Life is like a black hole that can’t be filled. The most exaggerated one time, she bought a box of clothes at once, 22 pieces, is the whole dormitory together to help her carry back the courier station; also bought 15 pairs of shoes, the dormitory iron shoe rack are bent. She didn’t wake up until six months later, when the debt collection calls came again and again.
People who are in debt
The reasons for their debts are varied, but the experience after debt is surprisingly similar: stress, depression, and even love and marriage, and at the worst time some people want to die, but worry about the debt left to their parents. Some people owe $1.05 million for stock speculation and have been careful to hide it, not daring to let their wives know, but leaking out during a fight. Others have been engaged to be married but got caught up in the frenzy of speculating on bitcoin and ended up owing $600,000, and their fiancé decided to back out of the marriage after the eastward spill.
Just this past shopping season, a douban group called “Debtors Alliance” hit the top of the search. Many people share their experiences with debt on it, and these posts often start with titles like, “$200,000 in debt and won’t be able to pay it back” “19 years old owe more than 20,000, confused do not know how to pay back”, and “26 years old, the surface is bright and shiny, but in fact more than 600,000 in debt”, the author is “lonely soul “.
From time to time, someone will post a question: single indebted women, can still get married? That is a 27-year-old woman, debt of 460,000, credit has rotten, afraid to fall in love, afraid that the other party can not accept, more afraid that they will end up alone.
Someone who was so burdened with debt that she got depressed and started taking antidepressants. In order to understand why they can not control consumption, always buy a bunch of useless things, they went to see a psychologist, and finally was diagnosed with “adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder The last diagnosis was “adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”. Seeing this post, many people feel that they understand their problem, “So this is the characteristic of shopaholics.
For Akira, the anxiety of this debt permeated his every night. There were many times at 5 a.m. when he didn’t sleep, tossing and turning in bed, and two hours later he had to get up, wash up, and take the subway to the office. the 29-year-old has no idea how many sleepless nights he’s experienced. From the beginning of his $50,000 debt, he fell into a constant sleeplessness. After four or five years, his debt did not decrease, but increased at a terrible rate. By the time he realized it, it had reached 400,000.
The money was all from the gifts he had swiped in the live stream. For a few years, Ming Xin inexplicably fell into this to come. As long as he spent money, his favorite female anchor would quickly notice him. The money is not enough, he began to borrow.
He went to a good university and had a good job. If there was anything he liked, it was reading books. It’s not that he didn’t reflect on how he could go to watch beautiful women live and spend so much money. Seeing the bank statement, Ming Xin sometimes feels confused, who is this person who swiped the card to spend? It was like another person, a person he didn’t know at all.
Life was like having a black hole that could not be filled. Debt is also the most painful experience for Liang in the past four or five years. Every few days after work, he used to sit in his car and stare blankly into the distance, or swipe his phone without knowing what to look at. It was not until he changed his mood and role that he dared to go upstairs to face his wife. Even so, they would quarrel over some trivial matters, and even fight, the most serious one was when his wife picked up a knife, scaring him to rush over and snatch it down.
But everything was only in so many days. The past is also numb, he became a civil servant in a small city again, not to say a good husband, perhaps a good father it.
For a while, he soaked in Baidu postings every day, researching various tables. I remember the first piece is Casio’s electric wave table, then one after another bought Seiko, Shanghai, Tissot, Tenno’s table, each piece more than 1000, less than 2000 yuan, are not expensive. Then the radio. He likes the sound of the radio squeaking, Sony, Dickson, Shanjin, each one is different: this one is good sound quality, that one is a strong ability to collect waves. Only he knows the feeling when he places an order, it’s exciting, “like the brain is secreting dopamine”.
He has hoarded eight radios, six watches, four cell phones, cars, motorcycles, electric cars and bicycles. At first this was just an accident on the road of life, but then the big spending became a habit. Even after he got married and had a family, he still didn’t get rid of it, and the debt gradually accumulated to more than 250,000.
As for Xiao Nan, a girl still in college, she got into debt crisis, at first just out of curiosity. One night last year, she and her roommate opened the live broadcast of a well-known e-commerce anchor, wanting to “see how good this man really is”. The next thing she knew, no one could come out of the studio empty-handed.
She is not a girl who likes to dress up, in the past life, the biggest purchase is to buy a 1299 yuan cell phone, borrowing money is almost never a thing, she is afraid to owe people points.
But after that day, when the anchor shows all kinds of evidence: quality inspection report, celebrity endorsement, EU certification, she will fall. Waiting for the anchor to finish “three, two, one! She was ready to sprint, and she felt happy after clicking on the order.
The most exaggerated one time, she bought a box of clothes at once, 22 pieces, the whole dormitory together to help her carry back the courier station; also bought 15 pairs of shoes, the dormitory iron shoe rack are bent.
It was not until six months later, when the debt collection calls came again and again, that she came to her senses a little.
Out of control
We sent private messages to many people, mostly young people, college students, couriers, civil servants, and real estate agents. They are not unaware that the debt has been overspent, but can not stop, a girl in debt is this, spending money can not talk about sanity, like “drug addiction” The company will pretend not to know the consequences, “as if tomorrow to the death penalty today on the same orgy, today there is wine today drunk. “
Ming Xin was born in a middle-class urban family, the family has a house and a car, from childhood, there is no shortage of material, very good at school, is the kind of “other people’s children”. His parents divorced when he was a child, his mother brought him up with a very strict tutor, from childhood, the requirements for him is to excel in school, to understand, he has always been so performance. He liked to study, got into a good university and had a pretty good job.
But when he grew up, he found that many people were even better than him.
The psychological gap, he “will use the desire to consume to make up for his psychological hole”. Whenever he made a large amount of money in the live broadcast, he would immediately gain the attention and recognition of the whole audience. One time, he swiped off ten or twenty thousand at a time, ushering in everyone’s admiration and envy.
Mingxin feels that he has a “pleasing personality” and always wants to make others happy, even if he makes sacrifices and pays the price, as long as everyone pays attention to him. This kind of happiness comes very easily. In real life, even if you find a dazzling girl, “but there is no way to know her”. But in the live room, as long as he shows financial ability, it is fine.
Many times, Minami also asked herself, what exactly poked her? What can be recalled are just some very small details. For example, when buying that eye cream, it was the phrase: “You will stay up late at night, right, stay up late will certainly have dark circles oh. This sentence immediately poked Nan’s heart, “My mom, I stay up late, how many people are staying up late at night ah. “
Xiao Nan was facing severe anxiety when she entered the live shopping room, and her heart was at the peak of fear. At the worst time, she even had to take anti-anxiety drugs. Only in the moment of watching live shopping, she will not be afraid, time and heart was filled to the brim.
Still in her senior year of high school, she realized that the people she feared most were her parents. It was shortly after her parents’ divorce and she stayed at home, just her and her father, and she felt particularly scared of ghosts. But after her father left, her fear disappeared. That’s when she realized who she was afraid of.
But the image she was most afraid of was a woman with long hair with a cloak blocking her face. The image of that woman was her mother – it was an ordinary day when she cried in fear after her mother had washed her hair and it was cascading down the front. Although she and her mother are usually very close, “the closest people also hurt the most”.
For Nan, her mother has a complex image, as does her father. When she was a child doing arithmetic problems, her father asked her to make a question every ten seconds, tens of seconds, to “ten” when there is no answer, a slap on the face. Her mother would also beat her for strange reasons, such as forgetting a hair in the sink when cleaning, or forgetting to wipe the stove when cooking.
After college, she was the happy girl in the dormitory, and seemed to have a good relationship with people, but she was afraid from the bottom of her heart, afraid of the crowd, afraid of her roommates, sometimes afraid to run out alone to late study without class, “afraid that people are looking at me, think people will beat me “.
After soaking in the live room for most of the year, Nan figured out the various schemes of the anchors, but she was still trapped in it. Sometimes, happiness becomes very vain. Other people are happy to buy things because they buy things they like, but she buys things, “just like the thrill of paying and unpacking”. Nan was well aware of all this, and her roommates were talking about her and persuading her, but to no avail, “it was like being brainwashed”. She describes the thrill as unforgettable. “It was like a feeling that exploded in my veins,” that’s how Minami portrays it. “It was completely different from ordinary pleasure. “
The highest she had on her bill for Flower and Meituan was $15,000 in unpaid bills, an astronomical amount for a student.
Every person in debt can tell a sad story. Liang’s story began when his ex-girlfriend cheated on him, or at least that’s what he thinks. “She said I was stingy, wouldn’t go to fancy restaurants, never had a steak, never bought her anything nice. She said you must be willing to spend money on girls and be generous. “They broke up.
A Liang’s life should have been stable, he lived in a small city in the east, after graduating from college as a courier, and later took the civil service exam, living the kind of parents see “close to home, decent, stable income He lived a life that his parents saw as “close to home, decent, stable income. Like most people, his interest is to watch movies, if there is any difference, it is only the difference between liking Yuwa Eki or Iwai Shunji.
Later recalled, he realized that it was the moment of the breakup that he started to lose control. He took out credit cards and did seven of them, as well as spend and borrow, and started spending money with a vengeance. Was it pride? Or what? He only said it was stimulated.
He mentioned that when he was a child, his grandfather had a Shanghai watch, which he had observed for a long time but could not afford to have his own, and now he could buy it, albeit with borrowed money. He was a second child and was fostered by his parents in his grandparents’ home until he was 6 years old. His older brother always had new clothes to wear, and he had to wear what was left over from his older brother. When there was good food, his brother ate it first and he ate the rest.
Once when his parents quarreled, his father and mother threw him into each other’s arms, saying, “Hurry up and take him away, I don’t want him anymore, hurry up and give him to his grandmother. “He was so scared that he cried out.
Spending money on credit cards years later feels like a long, belated compensation, “there’s a vindictive thrill, just feeling like I should enjoy it because I didn’t growing up. ” He says, “It’s like making up for what you’re missing. “
While talking about these things, he sat alone in his car and talked to me on the phone for a long time. The sound of rain hitting the glass came through, “It’s raining outside now, and it’s kinda hard to talk about these things. “There followed a long silence.
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At first, everyone who spends overdraft believes they have to pay it back. This is how Mingxin started, brushing 10,000 yuan credit card, in 12 installments of 1,000 yuan each, their monthly income of 4,000 to 5,000 yuan at the time, fully able to pay back. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. Mingxin began to go to new platforms to borrow money to pay off old debts. Many of the debtors we talked to did this.
For those who lack self-control, it’s like Pandora’s Box, once it’s opened, it can’t be closed. On the Internet, you can borrow money easily if you want to, and platforms offer a variety of online lending tools that constantly suggest you can take out white papers and tell you to borrow and spend.
Debt is like a snowball, rolling bigger and bigger, so big that many people don’t want to face it, much less calculate how much they owe. Akira felt that as soon as his mind stopped, the feeling of despair would eat away at him. He found that his life seemed to be controlled by others, and the scary thing was that in order to relieve his anxiety, he chose the way to do it: keep spending. Because he needed a sense of joy, of happiness, “to make you less miserable and slightly better off”.
It was only after his debt suddenly exploded that One Reed faced up to the cruelty and embarrassment that comes with being in debt. When the epidemic started at the beginning of the year, banks and lending platforms suddenly tightened, and her debit limit was reduced at once, from 18,000 to 8,000, and finally shut down directly. The money chain of lending for loans was immediately broken.
That was in April and May of this year, and it was the most humble and embarrassing time in her life. She didn’t want her parents to know, so she begged around, sister, friends, elders, online friends, and boys who had chased her, all went to borrow, and had to make up reasons. It was hard to open up, and it was hard to wait for a reply after opening up. People either didn’t reply, didn’t want to borrow, or offered unsuspecting terms of trade – which Yiwei refused. In the end, she made it through by drawing on her provident fund, as well as loans from her sister and elders.
Almost everyone who is in debt will talk about some experience of being chased for debt. Qiu Ran went through it all last Spring Festival. For more than a month, he spent time alone in a rented house in the city, with his phone on airplane mode and a knock on the door. He used to change a cell phone every four or five months, are the latest models at the time, but also must be the flagship, but now only a few hundred dollars on hand, sometimes a day or two without food. It’s one thing to have no appetite, it’s another thing to have no money to eat.
Since the credit card limit was cancelled, he can receive 10 debt collection calls a day, even his mother, relatives have received calls – this is called “exploding address book This is known as “directory explosion”. When his mother found out, there was no blame, only helplessness and disappointment. Once Qiu Ran and her on the phone, she blamed herself on the phone, “your old man (father) died early, it’s my fault for not educating you properly. “
Xiao Nan’s debt was inevitably overdue. Debt collection calls always came at the most anxious times of the day, like noon, when she was getting ready to take a nap; or at night, when she was getting ready to rest. Initially, a human caller will gently remind you, “Don’t forget to pay,” followed by a robotic bombardment three or four times a day. If you keep hanging up or don’t pay, the debt collector comes on the scene.
At the end of March, Nan received a phone call from an emotional woman who reprimanded her: “What’s wrong with you, you owe so much money at such a young age? Do you know what it means to you to owe this money and what impact it will have on your family? “That whole day, Nan was scared out of her mind, and even once had the idea of light life. Luckily, she was timid and just thought about it.
The desire to shop suddenly disappeared after A Liang confessed to his wife, and it was only on August 31, after receiving a tweet from her saying she was ready to change her house, that he seriously calculated the debt for the first time. When he saw 258,000, he was dumbfounded and couldn’t believe it was that much. When his wife found out, she cried and asked him, “What should we do? “
“What else can we do? Sell the house to pay back the money. “Eventually they sold the house and took out a portion to pay off the debt.
From then on, Liang canceled his credit cards, cut them up, and shut down his credit and debit accounts, so every purchase he made was synced to his wife’s phone. In the “Debtors Alliance” group, he recorded his experience, and his only prayer was that he would never look back.
Akira is still teetering on the edge of the abyss. The 400,000 he initially owed had been paid off with the help of his parents. But just in those two months of repayment, he quietly spent another 160,000. Today, of that 160,000, 80,000 from debit and credit cards have been paid off, and 80,000 were borrowed from friends.
“People really don’t know themselves, and there’s a big gap between what you think you are, and what you really are. “The day I talked to him, he said to me that he was at a tipping point. He didn’t know if he had now pulled himself out of the live room or if he would fall in again.
◦All characters in the text are pseudonyms
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