Chapter 13 6. Lack of a companion

Scholar Wu Zuo said that if you have no acquaintances in Beijing, you are a city drifting in a bottle.What a helpless feeling it is: in this city, you search up and down, hit walls left and right, and end up alone. This anxiety is especially evident in the "ant clan", 92.9% of the "ant clan" are unmarried, and 49% of the unmarried people have no lovers.In urban life, the incompleteness of emotion is more than love, family affection, and friendship. When you can only live in a hut less than 10 square meters, what can you gain? "People flashed by me, and they hurried past me without giving me any expression when I asked for directions. Finally, there is no relationship at all between people. You can only take out your mobile phone, call acquaintances, and give advice. If there are no acquaintances , You are the city drifting in a bottle." This is the impression of the scholar Wu Zuolai on Beijing, he said, "The city of Beijing has made me anxious beyond reason."

The British philosopher Simmel summarized the "urban character" in his book "Metropolis and Spiritual Life", and mentioned one point, which is the "reservation" of urban people. Simmel said that reserve is a social negative behavior, so it is not a positive psychological response.Living in a small town, the relationship between people is relatively close. Everyone knows each other and even participates in each other's life.However, interpersonal communication in big cities is fleeting. Today you meet a salesperson, and tomorrow you meet a waiter in a coffee shop. There are many and extensive human interactions in big cities, but they are all very short-lived.Under such living conditions, the character and psychological state of urbanites become "reserved", and they prefer to retreat to their inner world.

For this point, it is not difficult to understand.There are no friends who grew up together, no family acquaintances, and no old neighbors... The broken relationship chain makes every immigrant in a big city at a loss.Just like a bonsai, twisting the branches to meet the flower pot is at best self-serving and beautiful. The "China Talent Development Report 2010" pointed out that due to the economic and living conditions, the "ants" generally encounter "difficulties in marriage and love".On the one hand, 92.9% of the "ants" are not yet married, and 49% of the unmarried people have no lovers.On the other hand, the sexual needs of the "ants" are also in a state of repression.67% of people have not had sex in the past month, while the average frequency of sex among adults nationwide is about once a week.The lack of interpersonal activity is likely to be vented through solitary sex or other avenues.

"It's worth comforting to be able to masturbate." Recalling the down-and-out boy in Beijing more than two years ago, Fan Jun (pseudonym) laughed at himself, "I should have changed my name to 'Guanjian' at that time!" And his "down-and-out", It started with his girlfriend Zhu Zhu (pseudonym) resolutely leaving—in the winter of 2008, he fell out of love. When the two met in 2006, both Fan Jun and Zhu Zhu were in the "fashion circle" and each worked for the entertainment media in the capital.Zhu Zhu is a little girl from Shanghai, and she stayed there logically just because she studied in Beijing. It was her dream to catch the son of a high-ranking official or a rich second generation, and this dream was once the object of Fan Jun's ridicule.Because he said that he "belongs to another world", with long hair, carrying a guitar and an old-fashioned military water bottle, and a big towel to wipe sweat on his trouser waist, Fan Jun, who has a dream of rock and roll, takes this A secondary image, rushing into Beijing from his hometown Chengdu.

People who knew them all murmured at the fact that these two "enemies" with such different value orientations got together.When Fan Jun recalled the past, he was very frank: "I'm just lonely." According to him, Beijing is big, Beijing is big, but because of traffic or economic reasons in Nuo University's Beijing, the chances of friends' gatherings are greatly reduced.In a small place, three or five old friends want to get together, and it will take less than half an hour to get together.But in Beijing, if three good friends get together, they have to plan ahead, fix the time and place, which is a very troublesome thing.The super concept of time and space makes it difficult for friends in the same city to get together.

Zhu Zhu and Fan Jun, who met during an interview, were surprised to find that the house they rented happened to be in the same community.Therefore, I often make appointments to go out to restaurants, because "it is too boring to eat boiled mutton alone".After that things become very natural. "To be honest, it's really not easy for a foreign race like us to find a companion in Beijing." Fan Jun called his encounter with Zhu Zhu fate.However, when he offered to "stabilize" the relationship, he was turned down.Fan Jun wanted to make a promise to Zhu Zhu, but Zhu Zhu didn't want to promise. She only wanted a home, a house of her own to shelter from wind and rain.

That night, Zhu Zhu cried, and Fan Jun also cried.The next day, he took a taxi for a long time to look at a new property outside the Fifth Ring Road.At that time, the quotation of 7,000 per square meter made him very frustrated. At that time, the monthly rent of the hut he rented in the third ring road was 2,000 yuan, which cost almost 1/3 of his salary. How could he save money? ?The desired small apartment has already been sold out, and the supporting facilities in the new community are not perfect, so Fan Jun finally "returned without success".However, just after the new year, housing prices in the entire Beijing city skyrocketed like a rocket, making Fan Jun's plan to buy a house completely hopeless.

If it is said that Beijing's high housing prices are a blow to Fan Jun.Then, his girlfriend's betrayal made him "even want to die".After a thrilling stalking, he discovered that his girlfriend had an unusual relationship with a young director she had interviewed.Then the two had a big fight, and Zhu Zhu proposed to break up.Fan Jun said that he once "begged her not to leave very shamelessly", but the problem of the house was like a huge gap between the two of them, which was insurmountable. After Zhu Zhu left, Fan Jun decided that women were his nemesis. He said, "After hitting there, no one should mention marriage to me. Anyone who mentions it will be in a hurry with me."

Although he once comforted himself, he still has a decent job in the capital, Yuji.But when he was alone, Fan Jun realized more deeply: in Beijing, the sympathy and love between people is pitifully small.Apathy became synonymous with normal human interaction.Especially among colleagues in the unit, utilitarian interpersonal relationships such as mutual exclusion, mutual wariness, mutual suspicion, and mutual competition occupy a very important proportion.This relationship is even more prominent in state-owned enterprises.This makes the whole city add more gray ideas. He analyzed himself with Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory. From top to bottom, self-actualization needs, respect needs, etc., seem to be satisfied, but the security needs that constitute one of the foundations of the pyramid are unexpectedly missing: "No sense of security, In such a big city, I feel helpless by myself..." Before this, Fan Jun never thought that a man would be insecure.

Later, the price per square meter of real estate in Beijing rose above 30,000.Fan Jun felt more and more that "this city is too magical, and my parents could not have predicted it with half a century of living experience."Fan Jun began to often suffer from insomnia. "You are a foreigner", this reminder is not only at the level of the household registration system, the property market is catching up and has become the biggest source of pressure for new immigrants in Beijing.It is not easy to get a one-foot "dwelling house" here, which also created the "mother-in-law's demand theory" of Gu Yunchang, vice president and secretary-general of the China Real Estate Research Association-"The rise in housing prices is due to the 'mother-in-law's needs'".

Just after the 2010 Spring Festival Gala, a group of videos of the "Property Market Spring Festival Gala" went viral on the Internet. One of the videos was changed to "Unforgettable Tonight". . There was also an unhappy repost on Kaixin.com, to the effect that due to the soaring housing prices, there is no middle class in China, only the bureaucratic class and the proletariat.Someone invented a phrase for this: "self-deprivation of social attributes."This is a kind of personal powerlessness. In the era of soaring housing prices, you can only be free from the burden if you give up the right to marry and have children... What if Fan Jun's generation is so ruthless that they don't marry and have children? In an upward society where development opportunities suddenly emerge, everyone strives for the top, overdrawn by work, overdrawn by competition, and overdrawn by emotions. There is no modern psychological excretion channel to match, causing mental illness and psychological imbalance in the whole society. "New Weekly" once published a comment saying: "Old capitalist countries are enjoying the historical accumulation of more than 500 years, slowly absorbing the dividends of the market economy. And our primitive accumulation has just begun. Others' 300-year anxiety is compressed in our 30-year During the year, everyone is like the Viagra of the market economy, with the greatest desire and the greatest pressure. When the GDP soars, China becomes a country that can't sleep. " In early 2007, Professor Li Shunwei, an expert in the Department of Neurology of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, announced the results of a survey on the current status of insomnia among the general population in six cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Ronghang and Hangzhou: 60% of adults in Beijing have experienced insomnia in the past 12 months. With insomnia symptoms, the vast majority of insomniacs believe that the main reason for their insomnia is too much pressure in life and work. This is an anxiety disorder of an era-tired when under pressure, and terrible when not under pressure.Everyone is swayed by the collective unconscious idea of ​​"success."People who put work first and life second are the majority in this era, they are social activists in the upward stage, and they are also patients to some extent. In fact, for an "ant clan" like Fan Jun, success is actually very simple, which can be summed up in four words: live and work in peace and contentment.It's a pity that Beijing can't give them. It was under this sense of frustration that Xiao Xiao, who was the editor-in-chief of a department in a newspaper in Beijing, mocked himself as "a very anxious person with no life".He is 28 years old, single, with a monthly income of 8,000 yuan.The work is on track, and it is enough to do it step by step, but it is also the assembly line-like operation method that makes him feel that he is no more than a supervisor at best: he has to sign ten to twenty versions every day, and he can leave work at midnight at the latest. Shengsheng trapped himself in the office.So he often complains that he has no life at all and no time to travel.For him, traveling is very important because it means looking for new things and ideas, and he will go crazy if he stays at home for more than half a year. He felt himself under double pressure.One is that I am unwilling to do things at the executive level, and I will start a business sooner or later, but I am still in the reserve stage; my career has not been properly arranged, and the marriage can only continue to be postponed. There are examples of divorce because the two people are not in sync He sees too much.Second, his parents in his hometown wanted him to get married early. The so-called starting a family and starting a career, the frail old father even responded to Xiao Xiao's "singleism" with "I won't see a doctor if you don't get married", which immediately made him feel pressured. Xiao Xiao has a saying to describe his kind of child who came out of the countryside: Going to the city-doing cultural work-engaging in the latest industry, a process that would have taken three generations to complete, will be completed in his own generation, and the pressure is natural No problem. In Beijing, there are not a few "beijing drifters" like Xiao Xiao.Therefore, "leftover men and women" is no longer a new thing in this city. "Leftover women" was identified as a new term by the Ministry of Education in 2007.According to the report of "Beijing Morning Post" on March 19, 2010: "The number of leftover women in Beijing has reached 500,000. On March 15, "New York Times" columnist Su Te focused on China's leftover women, and made a comment on Leftover-Ladies ( Leftover women) explained in detail: Leftover women, also known as '3S women', namely Single (single), Seventies (mostly born in the 1970s), Stuck (stuck), these older young women generally have a high degree of education , high income, but unable to find the ideal destination in marriage.” In the huge city of Beijing, how many people are alone?How many outsiders with the "Beijing Dream" are falling into a huge emotion: the dangerous big city, the pain of moving, and the deep-seated loneliness are mixed with their love and hatred for Beijing. "Nanfang Daily" reporter Zhang Bo once wrote an article to explain in detail the confusion of this generation: "Since the family planning was fully implemented in our country in the 1970s, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first wave of only-child births was created. Now, these only-children have gone through the period of rebellion and thinking, and entered the period of independence. In the middle of the year, they had children and began to bear the responsibilities of the family. The parents of these only children also entered the old age and began to need their children to take care of them. When they were young and left home to venture out, it became a family entanglement separated by relatives. "In fact, there are many people who were born in the same situation in the 1970s. A considerable number of those who came out to make a fortune in those years were once outstanding locals. These people graduated in the mid-to-late 1990s, just in time This is the end of the 20-year population movement from west to east, from poverty to developed areas. "As a result, in career development, people born in the late 1960s and early 1970s have become the backbone of the young management class; in terms of living standards, they have encountered a stage in which the gap between the east and the west has narrowed most rapidly. , the wages in the west rose rapidly and the east remained stagnant; when buying a house, it also caught up with the fastest rising Chinese property market in the past few years, and became a "housing slave" with a heavy debt burden. The combined result of these is It has created the mediocrity of people in an era, and created the "dream of breaking into the world" in reality, "with a jade body lying horizontally", and it is actually "naked." This is what Fan Jun once experienced. He said that at that time, his hometown was imagined as a refuge after being injured, or even a paradise—he never realized how fragile he was, and even began to envy his old father, who walked in The streets of Chengdu are comfortable and casual, and my father always likes to tell him: "There are acquaintances everywhere, there is nothing to be afraid of." During those days, nostalgia first appeared in Fan Jun's years of "Bei Piao" and took root. In the past, nostalgia was just a train ticket, and you and I stood at the ticket gate at the end of the year; now, nostalgia has become a job contract, a real estate certificate, and a school for children...Those young people The ideal is buried here. Housing, household registration, transportation, employment, marriage and love, etc., have all become unbearable burdens for young people in Beijing to pursue their dreams.So someone persuaded me, and I thought to myself: It's better to go back. On the eve of New Year's Eve in 2010, Fan Jun held a "personal farewell concert" in a small bar without heating. He stood alone on the stage and yelled "I really have nothing." The few buddies I made here.The next day, he carried the guitar alone and went home.My father found a job for Fan Jun at a small newspaper in Chengdu through his relationship. When asked if he left anything behind in Beijing, Fan Jun gave a wry smile and replied: "Maybe there are still some fragments of my dreams... Also, no one can mention marriage to me, Whoever mentions it will be in a hurry with me.” Sometimes, the shadow that a city can leave on people is bigger than the city itself. In March of this year, Premier Wen Jiabao made the "Government Work Report" on behalf of the State Council, proposing to "make people live happier and more dignified lives" and deploying reforms of the income distribution system, such as taking into account efficiency and fairness in the initial distribution, so that all These elements follow market principles to obtain income, and strengthen the adjustment of unreasonable factors; pay more attention to fairness in redistribution, focus on increasing residents' income, and accelerate the improvement of the fiscal and taxation system; improve the public service system, improve the quality and level of public services, and promote Equalization of public services to solve the problem of fair opportunity in the public service field; focus on narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas, and give full play to the important role of urbanization in narrowing the income gap and promoting economic development. Since the above items involve the distribution of social resources, including the redistribution of rights between labor and capital, every decision must involve countless nerves in society, and the contradictions between theory and reality encountered must be huge. Let the people in this city live with more dignity.Obviously, the word "dignity" involves not only material satisfaction, but also the abundance of spiritual life.This kind of good wish reminds people of the heartfelt words of the poet Du Fu thousands of years ago, "There are tens of thousands of mansions in the world, sheltering the poor and happy people in the world".On second thought, what step has the city reached before it needs to be reminded more solemnly, "Let the people live with more dignity"?