“One person living alone, two eyes drowsy, three meals takeaway, four seasons Taobao”, this is the netizen’s flirtation with living alone, but also a lot of “empty nest youth” in the big city drifting the real picture.
In recent years, first-tier cities have become a gathering place for single people, and more and more empty nest youths have emerged. According to statistics, as of 2018, the number of young people living alone in China exceeded 77 million, and it is expected that the scale of “empty nest youth” will rise to 92 million by 2021. What is the current situation of the life of empty nest youth? What are their life confusions? Let’s take a look.
01The state of empty nesters
They are tired of running around in their lives. As an empty nest youth who have picked up their bags and waved goodbye to their hometowns to embark on the road of pursuing their dreams in the city, “busy” and “desperate” have long been synonymous with them. The day starts with the alarm, and the overtime or late night is the real picture of most of the empty nesters. Generally speaking, empty nesters live far away from their workplace, so they leave early and return late. Takeout or canteens provide empty nesters with the convenience of saving time at work, and it is common for them to exchange and discuss their work experience during lunch break or lunch, and dwell on their work dilemma. In addition, some leaders tend to assign tasks to empty nesters, and the characteristics of living alone and single make it unnecessary to worry too much about the balance between family and career. Overtime has become the work norm for some empty nesters, and the line between work and life begins to blur gradually. Even after work is over, it does not mean the end of busy life. The integration of life and work is intensified by the update and iteration of high-tech and social media, and the emotional greetings from family and friends are merged with the work tasks from supervisors and leaders.
The monotonous and mechanical work pattern. Most of the empty nesters’ capital to make a living in the city is their own strong knowledge, vision and comprehensive quality, but from the subjective factors, the expectations of the empty nesters for personal promotion space and salary and benefits are also decreasing when they are looking for a job or in the middle of a job, and most of the jobs are mechanized and repetitive day after day, and the increasingly obvious division of labor and independence cause indifferent relationship between leaders or colleagues. The objective conditions, such as the division of labor and independence, make it more and more difficult for the empty nesters to identify their dignity and value. For a small number of empty nesters with low education, weak abilities or difficulties in finding jobs for many other reasons, they have started to show their lives to the public through electronic products and media to obtain economic resources, such as the rise of live streaming, which has become a cure for empty nesters. Even if the threshold is low, the content is in a single form, and it even affects and harms their own health, its characteristics of short cycle and high income greatly attract some empty nesters.
The psychological pressure of depression is difficult to tell.” Most of the empty nesters cannot feel the warmth and companionship of home in the empty rooms after returning home from work, and it is difficult for them to find someone to talk to when they are tired and confused. There is nothing that can make the empty nesters open up their hearts and talk to each other more than “friends who share the same illness”, but being in a big city, the chance of face-to-face talk is not much, and the difference of each other’s life trajectory or leisure time also makes this kind of communication lack a certain timeliness and common feeling, so some young people use virtual and short entertainment methods such as catching up with dramas and online games to pass the “empty” time. However, the lack of companionship and confidantes for the empty nest youths who suffer from various kinds of pressure for a long time will certainly breed corresponding psychological diseases, and deepen the entanglement of depression and anxiety to the empty nest youth group. Although the developed market economy, rich urban life and open network social system make the life of living alone with autonomy more and more attractive and more in line with the requirements of modern life, most of the empty nesters show the daily life of living alone without interaction and away from the hustle and bustle. However, in reality, some empty nesters prefer a certain degree of personal space and freedom, and at the same time, they are eager to have friends who are on the same level as their spiritual world for interaction and communication.
02 Perspective on the characteristics of empty nesters
The material level of poverty. Most of them have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Whether they have learned their skills from their hometowns or they are “kings” from small cities, they have at least one or more professional skills, and with their rich theoretical reserves and social experience, they are competitive in order to work in the city. But at the same time, most of the empty nesters come from rural areas or small and medium-sized cities, and the north is both a “paradise” and a “hell” for them to realize their ideal ambition and aggravate the shyness of their pockets. The career of empty nesters is usually in the beginning stage, and they do not have sufficient economic resources and a solid material foundation. Some empty nesters choose to rent small and poor rental houses in remote suburbs or urban areas, and some empty nesters seek to share roommates in order to minimize their burden. All these make many empty nesters feel a sense of belonging and loyalty to big cities.
The spiritual level of loneliness and emptiness flowing.” No one asks me if my porridge is warm, and no one stands with me at dusk” has long been a buzzword depicting the loneliness of most empty nesters. Although there are voices that empty nesters have 99% freedom and 1% loneliness, if there is a moment when the latter takes the top spot, it must be sickness. However, even though empty nest youth enjoy the freedom of living alone at the action level and the thrill of fighting for their dreams, learning to be alone and enjoying solitude is still the most impressive life journey and growth transformation for most empty nest youth. Facing the complex social environment alone, it is difficult for them to share the joy of success or the heartache of frustration with others, and “living alone, drowsy eyes, three meals of take-out and four seasons of Taobao” makes the spiritual life of empty nesters increasingly empty. Some of the empty nesters are looking for a way out in the online world, but the inner isolation still cannot be completely eliminated. In addition, pets have become another emotional partner and spiritual support for empty nesters, which is evident from the rapid development of China’s pet economy. The bigger the city is, the smaller and lonelier people are. The video of a restaurant placing a teddy bear in front of a one-person dining guest has exploded all over the Internet, but it also maps out the elevated level of loneliness of people in modern society, and the so-called “international loneliness scale” lists the level of loneliness from one to ten, such as moving alone, watching the sea alone, watching movies alone …… is being practiced by empty nest youth one by one. Empty nesters are practicing one by one.
The social level shows a single indifference. The relationship between individuals and society has been an eternal topic in sociology, and the term “unattached society” has become a buzzword on the Internet, which also shows that people have started to lose three kinds of ties: social ties (social interactions), blood ties (relatives’ interactions) and local ties (hometown interactions). Most of the empty nest youths emphasize more on their own feelings and rights in their development, focus on the improvement of their self-interest and ability, and are more likely to disregard their sense of identity and belonging to the group and society, and retreat from the vision of collective and public life. However, at the personal level, young empty nesters also have the need and desire to communicate and exchange their feelings with others, but the fast-paced life, transportation and time cost in big cities have increased the anxiety of young empty nesters, and the sacrifice of individuality and freedom has made “no money”, “too busy” and “boring” the most real reasons for young empty nesters. Currently, communication and interaction are no longer limited by time and space, which greatly eliminates many excuses for empty nesters to refuse to socialize, but makes socializing more convenient and efficient to a certain extent. However, online social networking has also created invisible social barriers and online cages for young empty nesters, making them more inclined to anonymous and symbolic online communication, and to talk with strangers through social software to seek a touch of warmth and solace. However, this state of cheerfulness online and silence offline has become the culprit of social fear among empty nesters.
03 What is the confusion of empty nesters?
The sense of deprivation of urban integration. Empty nesters are embedded in the city by migrating from abroad, and they feel the gap between their actual social status and the expected improvement of their life, whether it is the differentiation of living classes, the isolation of group interaction, the lack of promotion opportunities, or the economic cost of interaction activities. This high sense of pressure, low integration, and low efficacy continues to accelerate the sense of deprivation of empty nesters, making them “marginalized” or “outsiders” outside the reinforced concrete of the city. In addition, empty nesters also face the biggest problem from the “necessary attributes” of big cities. On the one hand, the urban-rural dualism represented by the household registration system not only limits the career development of empty nesters, but also makes it difficult for empty nesters to integrate into the city in an all-round and wholehearted way when considering long-term issues such as social welfare and education of their offspring. On the other hand, the difficulty of integration makes empty nesters more mobile in big cities, and it is not easy for them to establish stable and deep interpersonal relationships with local residents, which makes them feel more deprived of urban integration.
The ambivalence of living alone. In the present day, late marriage and late childbearing are gradually accepted, parents’ intervention in their children’s choices is reduced, and children become prominent in the family. As an only child, they are used to having their own room and space, contributing to their tendency and subconsciousness of living alone lifestyle. Therefore, in this social atmosphere and context, young empty nesters no longer blindly follow their parents’ orders and consider marriage and children as a lifelong event. With good quality and higher education, young empty-nesters have their own ideas about career and life planning, and “establishing a career before starting a family” and “having more life experiences” have become their goals of balancing life and work. As a result, even though young empty nesters suffer from setbacks in the process of establishing a career, get lonely in the solitary environment, and feel lonely during festivals and holidays, they still prefer to be single until they find a like-minded half with the same outlook, making the group of young empty nesters living alone grow bigger and bigger.
Self-perception of shakiness. Most of the empty nesters believe that “the time will come, but the time has not yet come” and “as long as they are willing to work hard, they can always make their own world”, but when they feel the pressure and have no sense of achievement due to certain conditions, their psychology changes subtly and they start to deny or doubt themselves. The new environment, identity and experience give rise to new needs. The change of their cognition is not only limited to the expansion of their desire for self-development and self-fulfillment in the urban system, but also includes the improvement of urban survival concepts and values to supplement their original cognition, which then becomes externalized into questioning and criticism of themselves. Although this is conducive to the improvement of empty nesters’ cognition, evaluation, and ability to correct mistakes, the process of repeated reconstruction and renewal is unspeakably arduous for empty nesters each time, and individuals are psychologically torn between old and new contradictory perceptions, and they are burdened with the burden of moving forward.
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