A leisurely life that begins with the possession of a game character

Looking back, when Zhang Lan saw Zhang Jintao’s choice, it was like seeing himself in the past.

If there were no game panel, Zhang Lan felt that he might be worse than Zhang Jintao now.

No matter what, Zhang Jintao's life is pretty good now. His parents are still alive and the only thing he worries about is his marriage.

But he has several sisters, so no matter how worried he is, there will always be someone to support him in the future.

As for Zhang Lan, if his life had not been changed by the game panel, what awaited him was his father's serious illness and his recovery would have been a long way off.

The person you are dating is breaking off the engagement, and there is a high possibility that you will have to stop paying the mortgage on the house for which you just paid the down payment.

It would be fine if you sell it in time, but if you don't, and wait a few years, you may be in debt now, and the house price is not even half of what you bought it at the beginning.

There is no point in thinking too much about some things before they happen. After all, they have passed and it is enough to just remember the lesson.

Zhang Lan and his generation were born in an era of extremely rapid social development. From birth to now, in just a few decades, the development of society has been completely changed. It gives people a strong sense of separation, an unprecedented sense of separation.

Most people born in this generation, regardless of their class, whether in urban or rural areas, have an extremely strong sense of separation.

First, there was the sense of technological disconnection. When I was born, technology entered an era of rapid development. At the beginning, computers were not yet popular, and many people in remote counties and rural areas did not even know what computers were.

Later on, computers became very popular and there were many Internet cafes in the county. Even the elderly people in the rural areas who were isolated from the outside world and had little education knew what computers were.

Later on, QR codes, smartphones, and mobile payments had become popular in big cities, but at that time most people in many county towns did not yet have smartphones. This can be said to be a dual sense of division between technology and urban and rural areas.

Then came multi-screen collaboration, Internet of Things technology, big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence... these things have undergone tremendous changes in just over a decade.

I still remember that when I was in elementary school, there was an essay asking everyone to imagine the future technology. Looking back now, many of the whimsical ideas have come true.

This sense of technological disjunction is unique. If you ask a person from the Han Dynasty to travel through time to the Song Dynasty a thousand years later, he might be curious, but he would not be surprised.

But the technological developments in the past decade or so are enough to amaze people.

There is also a split in education. When we were in primary school, our teachers taught us to contribute to the collective and sacrifice ourselves for others. Later, we found out that we went to school just to get higher grades and beat our classmates. Only students with good grades can get the recognition of parents, teachers, and relatives, and can enter the key classes in junior high school.

If people had taken the college entrance examination a few decades ago, they would have found that the college entrance examination was based on what was taught in the textbooks. Since then, the college entrance examination questions have become more and more interesting, like a magic trick, and a large number of supplementary teaching books have emerged. This sense of separation between teaching and examination is also unique.

There is also a gap between my own feelings and mainstream thinking. My parents asked me to study with certain people, and although I always felt weird, I still nodded and agreed.

Later, when I wrote an essay, I had to write about the changes in my hometown. I followed the ideas in the tutorial book and said that my hometown had changed a lot. In the past, people didn't have enough food, but now every family lives a happy life. In order to manage the class more conveniently, the head teacher usually said something like "it takes two to tango". Also, even though the school is so bad, there are still students who do well in the exams.

Parents and elders appear to be friendly and pleasant in front of relatives and friends, but often gossip about the trivial matters of neighbors and relatives and friends behind their backs.

Such as: Zhang San gave too little as a gift, his uncle gave too little New Year's money to his child, someone's child is not good at studying and looks stupid...

When you tell your parents that you usually teach me to be honest, but you yourself are so hypocritical, isn’t this contradictory education? Your parents cannot refute you, but will still scold you.

When I was in elementary school, I wrote essays about my hometown and always wrote about how great my hometown was. However, my parents and teachers always told me to study hard, go to a big city, and get away from this small place and these low-quality people.

Parents watch short videos. In order to attract traffic, the creators of the short videos deliberately use some sensational titles to attract attention, and the parents believe them to be true. Although the children know what is going on, they dare not refute it, because if they refute it, a meaningless and internally exhausting quarrel will begin...

Sometimes I feel that these mainstream ideas are wrong, but faced with such great pressure from public opinion, I have no choice but to become part of the phenomenon that creates a spiral of silence.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but publicly refute these mainstream ideas, but soon, people around me began to exclude and attack me, and in the end I had no choice but to compromise, otherwise I would become an outcast in everyone’s eyes... until I became completely numb.

Later, when I look back at the mainstream ideas I faced at each period of time in the past, I will find that many things need to be thought about dialectically, and sometimes it was the mainstream ideas of that period that led me astray.

In fact, I felt it was weird at the time, but I was unable to think independently at that time.

Teachers and parents say that studying hard is the way to become a superior person. When they see the sanitation worker, the parents say that if they don’t study hard, they can only become someone like him, instead of telling them that studying hard will allow the sanitation worker to have a better job and living conditions.

The divisions caused by various information: a group of rich second-generations on the short video platform make people mistakenly believe that there are many rich people, and the average 985 score on the Internet makes people mistakenly believe that it is easy to get into a 985.

Looking back at the county, those who can earn 985 yuan a month are considered high-income earners, and only those who rank first in the county's No. middle school can barely get into a university. Later, when I graduated from university, I felt it was difficult to find a job, but I saw that my classmates were all glamorous.

There is also the severance of one’s own interpersonal relationships: when one is born in a county town or a rural area, when one is young, for some reason, if one does homework and studies normally, one can get good grades.

Sometimes I feel that my grades are too good and I am a bit out of touch with the group. I may also be a bit envious of those average students because I think they are sociable and have a sense of belonging.

When I entered junior high school, the academic pressure increased. Later, my grades were good and I entered high school. But at this time, I found that my score could not get me into any good school, but this high school was ranked high. My high school classmates called me a top student.

At this time, I felt as if I had essentially become an enemy with my classmates. Under the involutionary cultural system, only by defeating opponents through competition can we achieve success in the secular sense.

Although one hates this secular value and system in one's heart, the comparisons between other people's children and parents and relatives and friends force one to study hard and strive for a better material life in the future.

In daily life, I find myself incompatible with my relatives, and feel that they are of low quality, uneducated, and ignorant. And my relatives think that I can't carry anything on my shoulders or lift anything with my hands, and I am useless. (End of this chapter)