Written at the End of the 2010s, the Future Will Only Get Better#
The passage of time inevitably brings a sense of nostalgia. Unlike previous years, today I want to summarize the decade from 2010 to 2019. We often lament how many decades one can have in life; as someone born in the 1990s, I have experienced three so far, which gives me some shallow experiences to talk about life.
Interestingly, December 31, 2019, is also my 29th birthday. Reflecting on the past decade seems like a nice birthday gift.
The Two Graduations I Experienced#
Let's go back to 2010, the beginning of this decade. Statistics show that over 9.4 million candidates registered for the national college entrance examination that year. My results were not ideal, and due to my fear of senior year life, I did not choose to repeat the year.
To fill the longest statutory holiday in my life, I worked at a supermarket's fruit stand selling fruits. However, I couldn't endure the hardships of physical labor, so I quit after two weeks and found a job as a game booster.
Being a booster is actually a very boring job; no matter how interesting the game is, it becomes tedious after countless repetitions. My boss at the time suggested I watch TV shows to pass the time. Yes, compared to selling fruits, this job allowed me to sit and watch TV continuously. That summer, I caught up on all the movies and TV shows I had missed during school at an average of three movies a day and one TV show every two days. When it came time to settle my wages and leave, I had the illusion that I should pay my boss instead.
Then came the college application process, much like the movie "The Butterfly Effect" I had watched that year. The less-than-ideal results led me to deliberately choose a business school with a larger enrollment, despite my lack of interest, just to ensure a safe admission. The price of that safe admission was that I never grew to like my chosen major throughout my university years. In the end, apart from striving to improve myself, I resorted to countless ways to pass the time during those four years of college, but that's another story.
Later, everyone gradually received their admission notices, and gatherings followed one after another. I didn't have many friends, and after a month of non-stop boosting with almost no social activities, I missed many of those gatherings. Now, thinking back on some of the people from those gatherings, I realize I might never see them again, which is somewhat regrettable.
What comforts me is that on my E63 phone, the last photo related to senior year is a group photo with all my classmates before the college entrance examination, a two-person photo. I can't remember the pixel count of that phone or its memory size, nor can I recall whether it was to avoid regrets or for some other reason, but I took many photos and uploaded them to my QQ space at the time, which turned out to be the choice I regret the least.
During the waiting period before school started, I spent almost all my time at home watching movies. The security guard in the property management was only a few years older than me and occasionally came over to watch for a while. At that time, I could barely understand the main plot of the movies, while the security guard rambled on without regard for the storyline or my viewing experience. Later, when I mentioned this to my dad, I felt it was sad that someone who hadn't been to school couldn't even understand movies. My dad said, "Don't think you're superior just because you've studied a few more days; everyone grows up in different environments, and experiences and feelings will vary. That's completely normal." It took me years to finally understand this.
Then came four interesting yet boring years of college. The development of technology and life was truly changing rapidly. By 2014, when I saw classmates who were less ambitious than me gradually finding jobs, I realized that graduation was really coming. That year also saw the arrival of the iPhone 5S, which had just started supporting 4G.
After skipping a thousand words about the job search experience, I finally landed what could be considered my first "serious" job. I would describe it as a nine-to-five job with weekends off, monotonous content, and low pay, which was particularly fitting.
I mustered the courage to tell my family that I had graduated and didn't need any financial support. To compensate for the low salary, I voluntarily resumed my old job as a game booster on the side. Thanks to the economic development, in just four years, my earnings from boosting sometimes exceeded my main job, and combined, I barely managed to make ends meet.
As mentioned earlier, being a booster is extremely boring, and coupled with the repetitive nature of my main job, one sleepless night after engaging in social production activities for over half a year, I couldn't help but ask myself a soul-searching question: Am I really going to live my life like this? Is there anything I can do that is "meaningful"?
The answer was truly no. Every day, apart from sleeping, I was just passing time waiting to sleep.
To escape this meaningless busyness, I started requiring myself to keep a diary. The initial intention was simple: since I didn't know what meaningful things to do, I would just record what I did each day. At first, there wasn't much to write about, so I wrote about my gaming experiences, how much I earned, whether I could earn more the next day, and what gaming events I needed to participate in over the next week, and so on. Over time, it became an indispensable habit.
This way of life continued until early 2015 when, under my dad's "strong suggestion," I left Jinan, where I had spent five years studying.
Looking back, those were truly relaxing and enjoyable five years, but from a sad perspective, they were also five years of loss. During those five years, I hardly accomplished anything I could be proud of, let alone feel any strong sense of happiness. The turning point probably began after I returned to my hometown.
Skipping another 2000 words about the job search experience, time flew by, and before I knew it, I had been working at the first job I found after returning home for four years. Interestingly, in the rapidly changing internet industry, those four years felt more like being in college. My curiosity about the unknown was refreshed every so often, and I began to have things I could feel proud of, new skills I was interested in learning, and a sense of achievement from applying what I learned in life. I was delighted; that "meaningful thing" I had struggled to find years ago seemed to have been discovered.
In a daze, I am grateful for that sleepless night years ago, and I am also thankful for that summer after graduating from senior year, which allowed me to binge-watch a whole series called "Soldier Assault." I can't remember what it was about, but I clearly recall Xu Sanduo saying to do "meaningful things." To summarize such a broad and cliché definition, I naturally thought of Ostrovsky's quote: "When he looks back on his past, he does not regret having wasted his years, nor does he feel ashamed of having done nothing." I certainly don't have the courage or goal to fight for the liberation of humanity, but I think it's quite remarkable to be able to make every day meaningful.
Even without any extraordinary experiences to boast about, I still feel like a relatively lucky person. Over these ten years, I have managed to enjoy laughter and joy for a significant portion of the time, casually "squandering life." In the face of major life issues, there have always been people who could guide me at critical moments, and I was fortunate enough to find something I felt was meaningful in the last few years.
Postscript#
I once regretted whether things would be better now if I had made good use of the first five years. The unfortunate reality is that it wouldn't. Some things seem destined to be experienced before one can understand them. If everything were to return to the beginning, perhaps it would be a completely different decade, but the me from that first year didn't do much, and even if the same situation were to return to that year, I still wouldn't have acted differently.
In the real world, of course, there isn't another version of myself from a parallel universe who would come over in a time machine to tell me what will happen in the future and how I should respond.
In 2015, on my way home from work, a colleague who was walking with me said he didn't know when he would be able to own a house in this city. I didn't know how to respond; I just felt that the average price in the city rising to ten thousand seemed far off. There was no other version of me from a parallel world saying, "Hey, the interest rates are so low, buy a house early."
In 2016, I joked with friends that I had been single for over so many days. There was no other version of me from a parallel world saying, "Don't worry, two years later, someone will have a dream. She will dream of you getting together with her best friend, and when she wakes up, she will introduce you two, and the person she introduces will eventually become your wife."
In 2017, I didn't want to go to work, so I took a day off and slept in. There was no other version of me from a parallel world saying, "Get up quickly, go home before six in the afternoon, and stop your dad from going to work on that road he has taken for over ten years; a car will come rushing out."
That will never happen.
These ten years have seen too many outcomes and choices, too much unwillingness and regret, and too many reflections and realizations. At first, I thought giving meaning to things could allow me to feel justified in self-satisfaction, but now I find that the search for meaning itself is also interesting. Even in the end, if you discover that the meaning you seek doesn't exist, or that what you consider meaningful holds no significance for others, it doesn't matter.
It's just a different life.
But the world will surely get better in the process of searching,
Every time I think about how lucky I am to experience a few more decades,
I begin to look forward to the upcoming 2020 with great anticipation.
Wishing myself a happy 29th birthday, and wishing everyone peace and joy.
I'll stop writing here.
Offshore Boat
On the night of December 31, 2019