On the one hand, there is a noble son from a cold family, and his efforts are finally rewarded. Dr. Huang Guoping, a computer scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has touched millions of readers with his self-reporting of his life. On the other side is a completely different picture, CCTV Finance reported that a takeaway platform during the epidemic, 580,000 riders were added in two months, 40% of which came from manufacturing workers. Some takeaway workers said that they “would rather take out three or four thousand dollars in wages than go to the factory and get five or six thousand dollars in wages”.
China’s courier workers exceeded 10 million, and 7 million takeaways. China’s college graduates are increasing by tens of millions every year, and the best of them are entering the big Internet factories, with starting salaries of 50,000 and millions of dollars a year. But many graduates are having a hard time choosing a job, a classic paragraph is like this, “China has sent away cheap migrant workers and ushered in cheap college students”, “You can’t find a migrant worker for 3,000 yuan, but you can find a college student for 3,000 yuan. “.
Who is more representative of the current situation of the young people, the humble student or the $3,000 rider or the $3,000 graduate?
Dr. Huang Guoping’s pursuit of education is undoubtedly inspirational. He came from a mountain valley, his mother left and his father was poor and sick, and life seemed to be difficult for him everywhere. What would have been normal for most of his peers was a hurdle that he had to cross with all his might. A junior high school student, in the dark to the fields to catch eels, fishing, raising piglets, renting buffalo. The short video platform is also full of Up owners who do this for a living, but he has to pay for school with these. Sometimes when he stumbles back home, the eels are secretly sold by his father to buy meat and wine, and he has to raise tuition again.
From the trajectory of his schooling, it is clear that he was not so smooth either. First, he went to teacher training, and then to graduate school at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We know that the state has a policy of subsidizing the living expenses of teacher-training students, so perhaps that is why he was not able to apply directly to the school of his choice. Of course, he was also lucky to show his talent for learning from a young age, and the profession he studied was the most popular one nowadays. After graduation, he also went to Tencent, with Tencent’s income in Shenzhen to buy a house and settle down or quite hopeful.
But from Dr. Huang’s resume, I see the shadow of his peers. Among his peers, the children born to read seeds are lucky, while most of the qualifications can only “follow the stream”, the top students are only a very small number.
In high school, children had to divide their studies into arts and science, and were ridiculed by scholars for choosing liberal arts. In fact, there were also top players in liberal arts, who studied both Chinese and Western subjects. But learning journalism, Chinese, history, philosophy, I’m afraid that even employment is difficult, let alone the income of a large Internet factory.
Nowadays, the college entrance examination has been expanded, and there is no more “thousands of horses crossing the one-way bridge”, so there are not so many opportunities to change one’s fate by studying. Here we do not talk about college students, or focus on the same as Huang Guoping, the same children from the countryside. They do not have the perseverance and determination of Dr. Huang; they did not grow up under the care of their parents; their grades were not good; and they did not even make it to high school outside of compulsory education. It seems that they were blessed by the disaster of not being cheap college students and becoming high-priced migrant workers.
We know that things are precious when they are scarce. After the demographic dividend disappeared, the supply of factory workers was insufficient over the years, and migrant workers raised their eyebrows. The bosses of small factories had to go bare-chested and take their recruitment notices to the street to accept the pick and choose of workers. Some local leaders led teams to the villages where migrant workers gathered to recruit workers, courtesy of the sage. Treatment is more generous than couriers, more wages, some even package food and housing, but why so many young people turned into the express and food delivery business, and the upcoming courier delivery robots to compete for workplace? In the eyes of experts, they are moving from low-skilled manufacturing to the equally low-skilled service industry, with no personal career advancement.
Young people have their own answers, because the assembly line is full of repetitive work, and knowing 26 letters of the alphabet is enough to do the job, not to build experience and talent. One or two days off a month, all-day overtime, it is not easy to take time off, although the money earned a little more, young people still do not think it is worth. I have seen the killers styled delivery boy stepping on the electric car speeding through the streets, the speaker playing loud music, the body twisting with the music, the rock and roll youth like happy, perhaps the reason they choose this career.
Born as a human being, an important difference between us and animals is that we have learned to delay gratification. Because of ideals and ambitions, as Dr. Huang said, read the book and then go out, not in vain to live a life. The hardships we have suffered in our life become meaningful in front of a new world, which is indeed the most vivid interpretation of delayed gratification. Because there is a longer-term goal, we Chinese have been convinced since childhood that the sky will come down on the people, must first suffer their hearts and minds, labor their bones, starve their bodies.
But people are rational animals, delayed gratification is wonderful, as economically rational people, but will calculate whether it is worth giving up the pleasure of the moment to get delayed gratification. Join the factory workers can earn 2000 yuan more than takeout, but in first-tier cities, the 2000 yuan monthly income, save on 100 years can not afford to buy the most modest commercial housing, they will not struggle for the dream.
I have seen many bigwigs, after success are like to render their own youth to eat the suffering. They live in thatched adobe houses; they can’t taste meat for a year; they have to chisel the walls to study. The hardships of those days were not the norm for Chinese people, but they were not uncommon, and the material was so scarce that the country was generally motivated to change its fate. And because being poor and having no family background is standard for all people, the same starting line, the poor also have the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Nowadays, although there is compulsory education, a variety of help channels, rural children’s schooling channels instead narrowed, the reason is to be in a different competitive environment. An educational scholar once did a follow-up survey on the street shoe shine children in Vienna, those poor children did not gain the competitive advantage of growing up and running because of their early maturity. On the contrary, the children of the middle class are able to develop their hobbies and strengths in a carefree environment, and grow up to have a long-lasting foundation for their careers. Dr. Huang is lucky, but for most people, the so-called “suffering their hearts and minds, laboring their muscles and bones, starving their bodies” are meaningless, and suffering at a young age does not necessarily mean that adults will be blessed.
Once read the report of the three gods, in the daily salary of 200 yuan between the milk warehouse and 400 yuan of courier sorting workers, they actually competed to work in the milk warehouse, the reason is that the milk there to drink freely, and courier sorting conveyor belt chasing people, high tension, a day to do more than ten hours.
I really disagree with the gods’ “play for three days a day” attitude to life, but I still associate it with the status of life described in the Japanese best-selling book “Underclass”: while a few IT elites and business celebrities are intoxicated by the high-end fashionable urban life, similar to the cheap weekly magazines they like to read in convenience stores While a few IT elites and business executives indulge in upscale urban life, a low-income group of people like the “casuals” who read cheap weekly magazines in convenience stores is growing. Faced with competition and pressure in career and marriage, many people would rather not be the mainstay of their career and family, and willingly put themselves in the “lower class” category.
Naturally, this “lower class” is not the other “lower class”, which means downstream of the middle class.
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