Disillusionment
The family I experienced was an extremely painful process of class descent — slow and agonizing, watching everything that was once normally ours gradually disappear.
I’m starting to understand why my roommate always likes going out. I never expected that she spends at least four thousand a month, and up to six thousand at her peak (her dad is a doctor in Beijing, her mom is a lawyer). Then there’s another prodigy who drops eight hundred at a time on assembly model kits. It reminds me of middle school — back then I also loved reading all kinds of theoretical books, going back and forth analyzing things in our little circle, until a classmate I knew just hit me with: “That’s because you don’t know enough people. I already know a company boss’s son.” After graduation, her parents bought her a 300,000-yuan car, she got her driver’s license, and she’d drive around posting updates. Honestly, sometimes I feel like a clown myself. I know someone in a similar situation to mine, who also produced a lot of great work upstream, but in the end it was the downstream distributors who achieved financial freedom. Despite the latter’s moral decrepitude, all the railing and criticism in the world still can’t cover up the fact that, by any meaningful measure of success, aren’t I the clown?
The family I experienced was an extremely painful process of class descent — slow and agonizing, watching everything that was once normally ours gradually disappear. I feel a sense of disillusionment. Looking back now, the only event that could have changed the trajectory of this entire family and my life was years ago, during that craziest period of real estate land flipping. A building in the core area was demolished — perhaps I’ve told this story countless times — and the compensation that came down to the family was several million and several apartments. The final outcome, which I’ve helplessly complained about many times, was that a few other relatives got their share of hundreds of thousands, and what eventually flowed to our branch was only tens of thousands and one apartment. Not even counting our household — even the subsidy for university came from that same relative, using what little remained of those tens of thousands to fund me.
This disillusionment only grew stronger from high school onward. In my final year, I knew full well that the subject combination I was studying was of no use. Now I can no longer recall what I was thinking back then. I accomplished my goal — getting into a good university, even choosing the major group I had set for myself. But unlike most people, who walked out of the gaokao exam either cheering or in silence, I still remember standing by the wall near the gate while waiting to be let out, tears streaming down uncontrollably, even though behind the gates there were crowds of people chatting away. I even went to wash my face at the nearby garden faucet, hoping no one would notice I’d been crying. It wasn’t that I thought I’d done poorly — I just felt an overwhelming sense of disillusionment, a feeling that everything had ended too quickly. Perhaps I could no longer deceive myself; perhaps the most vibrant, most spirited chapter of my life was drawing to a close right there. When I finally got in the car to leave, I gazed out the window at people departing, pedestrians still walking about. I looked at my phone but had no idea what to do. I felt a powerful sense of disillusionment and unreality, as though none of it had ever existed.
I have never felt that any of this was meaningful.
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