Chapter 21 Part Three: Officialdom and the Market, and the Hesitation of Being Alone——Also on "Zhong Tuluo Syndrome"

Dear Teacher Xu: I am 30 years old this year, a deputy director-level cadre of the Jiangsu Provincial Trade Union.I have been studying and working hard. In the past ten years, I have grown from a junior college student to a master of laws, from a city trade union to a provincial trade union, from a clerk to being promoted to a deputy office in 2000. register.My husband is an architect and my son is 3 years old and very cute.I live in a lush, quiet and pleasant provincial party committee compound. The house is quite big and beautifully decorated, and I have hired a nanny.Everyone said that I was smooth sailing and lived a comfortable life.But I couldn't bear myself more and more, almost crazy.

I have a flamboyant personality, strong ability, work hard, not good at interpersonal relationship, being jealous and excluded; most importantly, in a working environment without innovation, vitality, and vision, I am shrinking day by day, ignorant and incapable of learning. He was in a daze, and his profession was completely abandoned.When I was young, my dream of becoming a famous barrister became farther and farther away, and I was like a caged animal in a cage. what should I do?Stay in the trade union and do a good job?Transfer to another bureau?Resign to become a full-time lawyer?study abroad?migrant?You are the hands of the orchid, please give me some pointers.

Looking forward to hearing from you, Jiangxi Fashuo Dear Jiangxi Fashuo: Thank you for your letter.Although your situation is so complicated that I cannot give you specific advice directly in the letter without meeting you, I hope my words can give you some inspiration. I have seen many people like you who are doing well in the officialdom, but are suddenly attracted by the opportunities and charm of the market, thus losing their psychological balance.I call this situation "Jong-Tuleau Syndrome". Zhong Tuluo is the protagonist of the second article in "Tuqiong Dialogue Record".The symptoms of Zhongtuluo Syndrome are: when you have finally achieved the life goal that you have been striving for since you were young, you suddenly find that it has become outdated, wrong, and backward in the process of immersing yourself in the struggle.The new value coordinates have suddenly risen when you have been working hard to accumulate the foundation, making the original ultimate pursuit extremely pale... So, you feel lost, confused, trapped, and regretful, just like you are now.

Chang'e should regret stealing the elixir, and Bihai Qingtian is heartbroken every night.This elixir used to tempt Chang'e to leave home and "fly" to Guanghan Palace; now, it is also torturing and stimulating you, making you abandon your official position and fly to the beautiful palace in your heart - the palace of market opportunities , the palace of business opportunities, the palace where talents are king... As a book about studying abroad, why did I put Zhong Tuluo's story in the second part of "Tuqiong Dialogue Record"?Gein Zhong Tuluo's plight is a very common phenomenon among friends in their early thirties in China today.Assume that there is a mountaineer, when he exhausted all his strength to climb Mount Everest, thinking that he had climbed to the top of the world, he suddenly looked up and saw a new orogenic movement, which has erected a "my 9959" in front of him. , and the majestic "My 8848" in his mind suddenly turned dwarf.Wow, how scary this is!

This is the only reason why you want to resign and Zhong Tuluo wants to "go abroad" which is tantamount to madness in my opinion. The pathogen of Zhong Tuluo syndrome is the obsolescence of the official standard system and the birth of the market center system.Under the official system that has engulfed China for decades, almost the only way out for young people is to become an official.Industrial and commercial professionals and freelancers, under the light of the "Three Represents" theory, became politically and legally recognized as the "emerging social class" of this society until just two or three years ago.

Look, the vitality and creativity of a nation and society, the value and rights of our existence, ultimately still need to be confirmed, recognized and not denied through official standards.Chinese society under the official system still has a long way to go. The official standard has its rationality, and the attraction of the officialdom is still great. To be honest, being an official is not impossible to make great contributions to society and oneself, but the volcanic eruption of the market and shopping malls, and the shock wave of China's economic development, are indeed true. It really disrupts people's pursuit of goals and muddles people's value orientation.

Your sorrow lies in this place.This sorrow is the good news of the times, but also the helplessness of the times.Those who have been reborn may be able to achieve positive results and become immortals; those who envy fish in Linyuan, if they don't want to retreat and make nets, they might as well return and sigh with their sticks: Alas, I don't envy the market or immortals, and I want to be an official wholeheartedly. I haven't met you, so I can't make any strong suggestions for your next development.But based on my remote sensing of people, I guess you were born to be a lawyer.You are fit to be a lawyer.My basis is that if you don't have the strong self-confidence and strong pursuit deep in your heart, you won't "go crazy" in pain, but you will only sigh slightly with a little melancholy, seeing your husband from You came back excitedly from outside, but quarreled with him for no reason. When he was puzzled by the second monk, kissed his fiery forehead to calm your husband's anger, then frowned and continued to live your little life.

From a college student to a master of law, from nothing to today's happy life, you should be grateful to fate and to God.However, a more colorful lifestyle, a freer spiritual world, and broader life choices make it impossible for you not to lose your balance. A ghost, the ghost of a lawyer's life, haunts your door.As a lawyer, your personal value, self-perception, and ability to earn money will all be realized better than they are now.Whether it is protecting the rights of the weak, upholding social justice, or earning money for a son to live a good life, it is better than now.As a lawyer, you can realize your own value more thoroughly, and you can satisfy yourself more truly.Then you will definitely not go crazy—even if you are crazy, you will be crazy because of your complacency!

You can still quit your job and become a lawyer. A lawyer is a true freelance, independent career, and a career that can express your personality!But for you, the only and biggest problem with resigning to become a lawyer, like our dear friend Zhong Tuluo, is that your opportunity cost is too high. So, you choose to hesitate—hesitancy of the soul, between continuing to be an official or abandoning an official to go into business, between the officialdom that has given you peace and stability in life and the market that may bring you more passion and wealth.When Mr. Lu Xun was writing novels back then, there was a poem as an inscription describing his mood at that time: a lonely new literary garden, and a safe old battlefield.The remaining one died in the two rooms, wandering alone with a halberd.

And you are wandering between officialdom and shopping malls.And there are poems to prove it!Xu Shi said: The old officials are on the standard, the young lawyers' firms, officialdom and shopping malls are wandering alone.I saw that your face is divided into two halves, the left side looks like a director, and the right side looks like a lawyer, your muscles are trembling violently, I don’t know which half to give up or merge... Now, please let me talk face to face A few ways of thinking about giving up and merging at a major life turning point like yours: Although the choice is always for gain, it often means giving up first. Although the ancients said that the opportunity cost is actively reduced to zero, who dares to discard what he has acquired through a lifetime of hard work as zero?Although the boat is broken, it is often one of the secrets of success that is difficult for ordinary people to imitate.If you are very unsuccessful in life, have nothing, and face a choice, there is actually no pain.Because even if you make a choice, what you lose is just helplessness, and what you gain may be glory.Losers lose only failure.

But the decision you are facing now is indeed very difficult.So, I want to share my thoughts with you carefully, maybe it will help you to make a decision.The official system has no future.Talent marketization is a historical trend.In fact, around the time I wrote this letter, Beijing, Changchun, and Henan provinces had actually begun to openly recruit from the public instead of promoting division chiefs and deputy bureau-level cadres internally. With the further reform of the country's civil service system, the days of recruiting competitive ministers and deputy ministers from the society may come soon.But in today's China, the official position is essentially a clean business.Officials—and I mean honest officials here—will not compare in fortunes with freelance lawyers in the market turmoil, as far as you can see.I didn't say that being an official is not a good career, I never would, because it's not true.But if you want to be an official, you don't want to get rich legally. There is basically no language error in saying this.Premier Zhu told Chinese and foreign reporters that his salary was only more than 3,000 RMB, and I believed it.Although he still has various free benefits for the elderly, as a good prime minister of the people, he should not have much personal savings. There is another problem with being an official: whether an official as a profession is suitable for you.Although you have done well as an official, are you the most suitable one?This is also an important factor to consider when you are torn between the director and the lawyer.In the age when you started working, entering the government sector for employment was basically an unconscious, assigned, and no choice—the government is the largest single employer in any country, especially China.Under such circumstances, when faced with government employment opportunities, people basically don't think about it. As an official, is it suitable for you?As a kind of culture, officialdom culture, have you adapted to it? I do have countless friends myself, high-ranking officials or bureaucrats, who thrive in their government jobs and live like fish in water.Although they know that the best life is to tailor their clothes and eat their meals, they are able to live with their clothes and eat their meals.They understand the gap between life dreams and reality.If they can't have both, they simply go to work to rule the big country, and go home to cook small delicacies.In life, how can you always be unconstrained and do whatever you want. It's a pity that you are in the sweltering Jiangcheng of Nanjing, and you put yourself into the steamer of the Master of Laws. You are boiled by the opportunity, burned by the future, and you can't eat well, and you can't sleep.To be an official, or to be a lawyer?To live, or to die? To be, or not to be? Let me give you another way of thinking, which may be closer to the conclusion you need in the depths of your subconscious: you might as well give up thinking about the gains and losses between the two for a while, and consider yourself purely from the perspective of "suitability".You can ask yourself: If the income of the two is exactly the same—both are 50,000 RMB, or both are 500,000 RMB a year—with the same economic benefits, should I be an official or a lawyer? Let me ask again: If there is no risk in the future of being a lawyer, just like you are the director of the division, then, do you give up the position of the director of the division to become a lawyer, or give up the lawyer to dream of becoming a director? Ask yourself this challenging question, and your future will be revealed! I bet you would choose to be a lawyer. You want to be a lawyer, and have even thought about quitting to practice law many times, but you are a little afraid of the prospect of starting from scratch, although the career of a lawyer seems very sexy to you.In the face of opportunity cost, you lose your size. I would like to ask you to read Hans Christian Andersen's The Mermaid's Fairy Tale, maybe you have read it.Thinking of Hai's daughter's painful process of wanting to become a human being as your own process of wanting to change from an official to a lawyer will definitely be amazingly enlightening to you.In fact, this is our fate, unless——unless you continue to stay in the sea, enjoying the boundless freedom and joy of mermaids, of course it is also a kind of happiness. Happiness is a feeling.To keep the mermaid happy, the key is not to let her see the prince on the coast.And you, not only have you seen the sexy legal prince on the shore of this market, you even studied a master's degree in law with him... The marketization of talents, the commercialization of talents, and the monetization of talents are the most brilliant future for talents. Xu Xiaoping