Canned Chen | From 2019, my social network and real life have become greatly divided

I think it started around 2019, when I felt a huge disconnect between social networks and my real life.

When I talk to myself and the people around me, everyone is basically becoming more and more decadent in real life, and they feel that the opportunities to climb up are starting to decrease—

Let’s talk about those within the system first. In fact, the iron rice bowl, starting last year, doesn’t seem so ironclad anymore. The so-called “landing” doesn’t mean you can stay on the shore for a lifetime, but that you will be swept away by a wave at any time.

Bonuses, performance evaluations, and talent subsidies from various regions are increasingly being reduced, missed, or even not issued at all. The news of downsizing (or another name for it, reducing staff and increasing efficiency) is also causing panic. I’m still in a relatively OK place, Jiangsu. Around me, in Henan, Shandong, and Anhui, I’ve seen the clearing out of contract workers and the reduction of personnel in the establishment already happening.

Outside the system, more and more industries are having a hard time. Let’s talk about two regions that I think are the most representative, Shanghai and the small county town where I live.

In Shanghai, because I know many friends in marketing, consulting, and advertising, starting the year before last, when I talked to them, they all said that clients’ budgets were getting smaller and smaller, and some former clients had even disappeared. It’s not that these brands are stingy; you can also see news about these companies closing down and laying off different departments.

In county towns, and perhaps also in some third-tier or even second-tier cities, business has actually been difficult to do for many years. Friends from these areas who have already entered society must know that, starting about five or six years ago, the only business that could make money was not to B, to C, but to G (government).

Yes, only those who do business with the government can really make money, and they make a lot, a lot, a lot of money. If someone you know took on projects like building shopping malls and residential areas a few years ago, this big brother should be financially free now. In third-tier cities and below, this is the only client that can really make people money.

This was only the situation in the past. Now, many people doing to G business can’t recover their payments.

But on social networks, I don’t feel any decadence. On the contrary, when I see some Weibo posts, I can feel this person’s adrenaline surging, probably spraying higher than the Himalayas.

Also, after 2019, the trend on social networks has been one movement-style hatred after another, hating a certain group of people, hating a certain other country or region, and now hating cats and dogs. If you don’t follow along, the infamy you bear is, at best, being an ignorant, naive, and artistic person, or a little bourgeois, and at worst, you’re taking money from xxx.

I remember reading a book before, where the author talked about their experiences in the late 1960s, saying that they and their family watched the frenzied crowd in terror, not knowing whether to participate or stay away. Ordinary families couldn’t make ends meet, and the elderly with serious illnesses, in order to allow their families to have more people and receive more food for the New Year, held on until the day of the New Year’s Eve before passing away.

I dare not say “this moment is exactly like that moment,” and I don’t know whether this madness and decadence are separate, or whether they are essentially the same thing.

Twitter user @TeacherLiIsNotYourTeacher has backed up comments from some users: