It's pretty hard to be a middle-aged man in China. Because of overtime work, the girlfriend who talked for seven years broke up. This time always losing hair, because of overtime, no time to see the doctor, no time to accompany the girlfriend, no time to attend the grandmother's funeral, no time to live for themselves. Only have the power to choose whether to take a shower today, whether to wash hair before going out, but now also can not, also known as greasy middle-aged man. Seeing Feng Tang's article, I believe many middle-aged men will decisively cancel the order of thermos cups they have just placed, whistling towards the supermarket downstairs, carry back a box of Coke, and have to defend the tail end of their youth with their lives.
A few years ago I was "ugly", and now I'm "greasy", I also want to like Lin Zhiying, like Leonardo DiCaprio as handsome to the eye, but in the end I have no leisure greasy life, good thing we can still afford to buy! Thermos cups, goji berry tea, and all kinds of strings, instead of those bottom men who are running around just to stay alive. Our desire to break free from midlife anxiety ends up being another empty cry.
Why is greasy
The label thinking is of course rotten, calmly think about it, behind the topic of "middle-aged greasy" actually contains two kinds of implicit logic:
One is the so-called arrogance of the upper class. The first one is the arrogance of the so-called upper class. If you want to do Mr. Feng Tang's "ten don'ts", it's hard to achieve it without some economic foundation. I've been struggling for 18 years to have a cup of coffee with you, and to make all the middle-aged men gentlemanly and aristocratic seems to be too rich and beautiful to imagine. Don't forget that Shakespeare once lamented, "Three generations do not produce a nobleman." The same starting line in a starting point, I carry a stone, while you are sitting in a car, to reach the destination time can be the same? I'm already better than my parents if I can afford a thermos.
The second is the exaggeration of the "cult of youth". Most of the buzz is in the hands of young people. Sina Weibo, for example, has data showing that there are 226 million young users between the ages of 18 and 30, accounting for almost 80% of the entire platform, not to mention the birthplace of neologisms, Station B, which is even more of a playground for young people. Jiang Fangzhou said: "To please young people is a common disease in society." In this "common disease", although there are emotions and values of human nature, more is the lack of social recognition and encouragement to the middle-aged and elderly groups. Young people always use "out" "generation gap" "speechless" to deal with the so-called middle-aged and old people, but do not know, the middle-aged and old people are also from the young age over, but also had to point to the mountains. They have also pointed to the mountains, waved their hands, and dung the year ten thousand vassals. How can they become so greasy when facing the new wave of young people?
In addition to spitting on middle-aged men, the elderly, middle-aged, young people, children can not be spared. Against the elderly, if the first few years of discussion on whether or not to help the elderly who fell down is a kind of self-preservation, the last year or two young people began to turn to the offense. People are debating whether "bad people are getting old" or "old people are getting bad," a dichotomy that is fraught with malice because either one associates old age with badness.
If it is the young who are attacking the elderly, who is attacking the middle-aged? Middle-aged people are the most unforgiving group in this society, with the old and the young, pressed by life and pressed by weight. Middle-aged people are a bit tacky and greasy, but if not for the support of their middle-aged parents, how can those young people who have just graduated afford to use the iphonex? So that elegance won't hold up for long.
So there is a mutual dislike between "stinky boy" and "stinky girl". Regardless of how they are defined, these two groups of people have two ****s in common: they are young, and they have no money. But isn't being broke the most normal state for young people?
This atmosphere of mutual dislike has even spread to children. There are videos online of a girl angrily kicking a child, disliking the little girl for crying, and this year, there have been several waves of condemnation of noisy children on high-speed trains. People who criticize children may have forgotten that when they were little, they cried just as much. So people have invented the phrase "bear child", but this word is at least half bored and half loved. More often than not, people transfer their annoyance with kids to their annoyance with parents.
No matter who you are, it seems, you're likely to get slammed with some unsuspecting label. Labeling as a mindset: blame, escape and revelry.
The Anxiety Behind the Grease
People seem to be more adept at attacking a collective than they are at analyzing specific people and events. Legally, that's a smart thing to do. Attacking one person in particular can lead to lawsuits, while using a label can offend more people but doesn't carry the responsibility for that offense.
People who are offended by hashtags tend to have very complex psychological states. On the one hand, they recognize that they're offended, but even if a person is really fat, he won't take a statement like greasy personally. He will see himself as an accident, and the old man next door is the poor guy who is being attacked; on the other hand, he himself is secretly right, which creates an inexplicable anxiety. As a result, even though one used to be so slovenly, one is now forced to wash one's hair once a day for fear of being flirted with for being greasy. Over time, if one goes out one day without washing one's hair, one will subconsciously think that the people around him or her are teasing him or her about being greasy. This is called generalized anxiety disorder in psychology. A person is diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder when he or she feels anxious or worried for at least six months or more on days that are not due to being threatened by a specific danger. Anxiety is usually focused on specific life circumstances, such as unrealistic concerns about a loved one's financial situation or physical health. The ways in which anxiety is expressed - specific symptoms - vary from person to person, such as muscle tension, easy fatigue, fidgeting, difficulty concentrating, irritability or sleep disturbances.
Generalized anxiety disorder causes deficits in functioning because the person's worries cannot be controlled or set aside. Because the person's attention is focused on the source of the anxiety, he is not able to focus adequately on his social and work responsibilities. These difficulties are compounded by the physical symptoms associated with the disorder.
There is nothing creative about the distinctions between old age, middle age, youth, and children, and there is nothing really offensive about such labels. A young man coming home to a meal served by his parents won't realize that he's just been in a group discussion about "bad guys getting old.
Categorizing generational thinking by age seems to be a y ingrained concept in China. But labels like "post-XX" have only been around since the dot-com era. The first truly effective label was the Post-80s, not the Post-70s or Post-60s, because the Post-80s were entering society at the turn of the century when the Internet became popular. Ten years later, people started blaming the 90s again, with the same thinking.
Meanwhile, after disliking the elderly, Internet public opinion is focusing on middle-aged people. No house, no car, no deposit, no object, became the old people to attack the young people's unquestionable treasure, at the same time, the network began to appear a variety of counterattack strategy, the young and the elderly completely hostile, so that the originally light-hearted topic has become the fuse of the war. As a new generation, they do have better living conditions and aesthetic interests under the upbringing of their parents, and their rebellion, though powerless on the whole, can at least create a ripple on the Internet. In real life, young people just entering the workplace have to please the middle-aged people around them, because this greasy uncle may grasp the door of the young people's promotion channel.
The reality behind the anxiety
On the surface, it seems that the elderly have gone bad, the middle-aged are greasy, and the young stink. And those so-called greasy middle-aged people are actually better off than the previous generation of middle-aged people. Few middle-aged people are anymore agonizing over whether their children will have enough to eat; they are anxious about real estate, medical care and education. Being a post-60s, a middle school principal said, "In the 1990s, a middle school in Beijing Ring, which is still a suburb, recruited teachers from major teacher training colleges and universities across the country, and one of the graduates refused to come to my school to be a teacher because he thought I was too rustic for drinking water from a can bottle." If you put it now, that 60-year-old principal should be a well-deserved greasy middle-aged man.
I believe that now men in their 30s and 40s will no longer have can bottles on their desks as drinking vessels. Instead, more and more accomplished middle-aged men are getting involved in cross-country, hiking, and long-distance running, and they want to rekindle their passion for life by putting their bodies through the wringer. Although there are still many arguments that "marathon is the square dance of the middle class", if you think about it, those who can run marathon are still the middle class. Pan Shiyi and Wang Shi do not run for show or for the vanity of conquest, but really enjoy the pain of the body, which is distant and unfamiliar to their daily lives, and which enlarges one's perception of the body, and which makes one feel that one is alive. The development of modern technology has not so much "liberated the body" as "stripped the body", with tools replacing the body's functions, and the middle class wants to use the marathon to reclaim their own bodies. So it's hard to imagine a heavy worker or a delivery boy deciding to run in a city park after a long day's work.
From this perspective, although more and more people are dissatisfied with their current lives, jobs, salaries, and spouses, this dissatisfaction, however, is not because the reality sucks, but rather, it is in the process of comparing and realizing that they are getting worse and worse, which is not an incentive for people to move forward. People are becoming more and more comfortable discussing issues through a holistic lens, and the fact that such topics, which can always be quite hot, suggests that there is, indeed, a collective anxiety that exists.
Zhang, who works in the jewelry industry, has passed his prime, has a house and a car, and likes to play with strings. Recently joined a hiking group because his daughter disliked his bloated body, and occasionally will take the family driving to Sanya, sleep on the night of the big S wedding stayed at the Conrad Hotel, the price tag of six thousand yuan per night? In Mr. Zhang's father's view, his son has washed away the yellow earth of his ancestors to live an aristocratic life. However, Mr. Zhang still has a lot of dissatisfaction with his own life: no work, no money to spend, the salary can not save, the daughter tuition fees more expensive than a year, the parents' health is deteriorating, his wife's friends' husbands more than one successful? The pressure of these realities and comparisons, so that outsiders seem to have a great deal of scenery Zhang, the word greasy deep recognition, and had to work twice as hard. The fact is that people are hard pressed to cite an unassuming lifestyle, and the young man's dissatisfaction is still, in essence, dissatisfaction with himself.
From youthful hair loss to middle-aged greasiness, anxiety is evenly spread over every period of modern life and is ready to trigger the sensitive nerves of the masses. Some people say that anxiety comes from more and more choices, others say that anxiety comes from the pressure from work to life. Whether it's choice or pressure, how can something that has already existed be completely eliminated? Anxiety is a self-defined emotion, and if you are not aware of it in your mind, how can it increase or decrease as your surroundings change? What crushes the modern anxious group is not the number of straws on their bodies, but the dirtiness of the mirror in their hearts, the exhaustion of their ability to think, and the demise of their free souls. Like Zang Kejia's most familiar poem: some people live, he is already dead. Avoid stepping into the greasy column, regardless of age, regardless of fat and thin. No matter what age you are in, the body is still to maintain, even if it is a thermos bubble goji berries, is not also a different flavor?