I am Qiu Shui, an unemployed blogger and a depressed young man

This article first appeared in "Youthology"

"Hello, I'm Qiu Shui."

Open the video of @risingobasan. In the camera, she is wearing fluffy artistic curly hair, smiling awkwardly and charmingly, and speaking Mandarin that cannot hide the flavor of Hunan.

Qiu Shui is an ordinary unemployed young man. In this era, he is not the young man who committed suicide on a date at Tianmen Mountain, nor is he the young man who became famous overnight and counterattacked from the bottom. She was caught in the middle, one of those people who had a little bit of luck but still worried about their livelihood.

What is different from other bloggers is that Qiu Shui is timid, optimistic and decadent. She does not have the typical confidence, talkative, exaggerated and high emotions of Internet bloggers, and she is not that dazzling. But her timidity is familiar to me, her low self-esteem, her tough talk, and her unwillingness are very similar to those friends who gradually separated when I left the county, those classmates who went to work after graduating from junior high school, and those who graduated from college A girl who wanders around the city after graduation.

Her story is not as dramatic as the media needs, but it is all too real. Open her video, and she will smile at you, occasionally showing a distressing self-deprecation. Of course, some people will also say that she is pretentious, literary, and a waste. But I think she has another level of vitality, a light one.

In the fruitless upward future, she took the initiative to choose downward.

01

Undergraduate college students

失业人的日常住五百的隔断房喝两块钱一包的挂耳咖啡听资本主义爵士睡社会主义床远在故乡的外婆听了我的故事笑到模糊

Unemployed blogger, bereft young man, these were the labels that Qiu Shui had for a long time.

At the end of 2021, she came into my sight from the video "I can't surf the Internet at an Internet cafe at work". In the video, she is wearing a blue jacket and headphones, recording her sleepy daily routine at work—occasionally flipping through the photo album on her phone, browsing Taobao, turning her head to see what her boss is up to, and then falling asleep.

This was her first video to hit one million, and the number of views far exceeded Qiu Shui's expectations. She jokingly said that maybe the Internet exposed the video to her boss, who had just recovered from five months of unemployment and then lost his job again at the end of the year.

Before that, she made a video introducing a 500-yuan partitioned room rented in Changsha. It had a narrow space of less than six square meters, a single bed, a small desk, and the distance between the toilet and the bed was less than one meter. , nor can it fit in a normal wardrobe. Since there was no place to dry her clothes, she quickly moved to another rental house after a month.

She once shared her screenwriting and planning work with everyone in the video "Living in a rental house worth hundreds of dollars, writing projects worth millions".

"I was devastated," she smiled wryly.

As the title of the video shows, there is a strong sense of contrast. While talking about her job as planning a multi-million-dollar promotional video for a real estate company, she was counting the red banknotes she received during the Chinese New Year one by one, and the balances on WeChat and Alipay. Got up, only 1,480 yuan was left on hand.

"All I think about are very sad things, and I don't know how to create happiness."

She continued: “But you can’t live without working.”

After that, she started photographing the daily life of unemployed youth. "Open", "wandering", "native dog", "whoring for free" and "escape" are the words that appear most frequently in her videos. In front of the camera, she talks to herself, is humorous, and self-deprecating, decadent and lonely, but without losing a little bit of romance.

In the video for "Happy Unemployment", she used the BGM of Wong Kar-Wai's movie "In the Mood for Love" as the soundtrack, and told the story of being fired with a playful smile. At the same time, she owed 2,000 in rent and computer installments, and her salary was only 2,600. The tragic story has long been It's a complete state of madness.

People who love her praise her for her art, while those who hate her say she is pretentious. Some people said she was strange, but she said, "There are actually many people like me." Perhaps this depressed state reflected the daily lives of many people, and the traffic began to favor her. In a very short period of time, her fans It quickly broke through 60,000.

"Some people look at me, maybe because they are in a similar state to me and can find a resonance with me; and some people are peeking into another life that is different from their own." This is how Qiu Shui understands the attention she is receiving. reason.

She once shared in front of the camera that when she felt inferior because she was a junior college student, she made a comment in the comment area that made me feel sad. "You have low self-esteem as a junior, he has low self-esteem as a junior, but neither of us has low self-esteem. We both have a bright future."

"If I'm not working, I'm just lying around," she said of herself. Unemployed and without self-discipline, she tried to earn a meager income through a small self-media business while working part-time as a waitress in a coffee shop from time to time to cover her basic expenses.

When she began to lose her job, she did not reveal her derailment status in her circle of friends, and would even deliberately create the illusion that she was working. But now she feels that there is nothing wrong with this state. "Because you are a leek, you might as well lie down flat," she comforted herself.

Although you will have no money when you are unemployed, you can still spend your time freely. As a self-employed writer, I am so familiar with this kind of self-comfort.

Before I chatted with her, she had just posted a video saying that she had found a job with a monthly salary of 4,000, operating a store near her home. But when she was at work, whether she was coding, filming, or holding some meaningless meetings, she felt it was meaningless. She joked, "They are just some jobs that will soon be replaced by AI."

Even though she had a hundred reasons why she wanted this job, one reason knocked them all away. Although she couldn't buy many things without money, she still returned to being "unemployed" due to unreasonable work and vacation requirements.

"This is all my choice," she said.

"After graduating from college, I realized that this was a process of accepting my fate. I completely gave up on going to work. I told everyone that I had a terminal illness that prevented me from going to work. I lowered my living standards to the lowest level, as long as I didn't starve to death. , don’t go to work. It’s too easy to starve to death, isn’t it? I think when people are forced into desperate situations, they will definitely work hard and work hard. I’m sorry that this doesn’t work for me at all.” She said in private It was written quietly on the public account that although escaping is shameful, it is useful.

A netizen once wanted to use the term "low-class person with no skills" to scold her, saying that she could only be a low-class person in her life and could not achieve great things by doing nothing. "If you don't work hard, you deserve to be at the bottom." Qiu Shui calmly accepted her identity as a low-class UP owner, but the narrative of "deserting to be a low-class person" made her feel like she couldn't lift her spirits.

"This is a group that has lost its voice. When it comes to unfair things, it suffers silently. Most people at the bottom don't know how to make decisions about their own lives. They don't know what kind of ways they can. There are too few resources and things that we have access to. Don’t forget, it’s the people at the bottom who really make the city run.”

Not long ago, when she heard the news that young people in Tianmen Mountain committed suicide on a suicide date, she could only force herself to be numb, because the environment of those people was too close to her. The relatives, relatives, classmates, and friends around Qiu Shui are almost all children of Chinese rural workers and farmers.

"They are all busy with their lives and have no time to surf the Internet. I can also express my voice online and maintain an expression that should belong to me. But they don't have time and don't have this option." So when this option was available, Qiu Shui turned the camera Focusing on the people closest to her, she made videos about the lower class, filming the wedding of her friends who returned to the countryside to build their own houses, filming the retail shop run by her family, and filming the lost countryside.

She doesn’t feel ashamed to live in a city partition house of less than 6 square meters and costing 500 yuan a month, because it will not bring practical troubles to her, who was still a transparent person on the Internet at the time. “Although the clothes often don’t dry, There will be a smell coming out, but when we were young, we lived in a house converted from a damp cement basement, and this environment is much better, so I don’t find it particularly bothersome.”

A month later, she moved from the partitioned house to another rental house.

02

Daughter of migrants

A video titled "When the wind blows here, my hometown is already far away" with a poem by Mo Xizi moved me deeply. Accompanied by Zhou Xuan's melodious singing from the old days, she used an extremely simple way to focus the camera on the "hometown" that has been abandoned for many years in rural Hunan.

The low rural mud house is damp and covered with moss, the walls are mottled, and the collapsed wooden bed frame is crooked. The light blue curtain on the left is half hanging in the air, and the iron bucket for water on the right is half-empty, with a row of lonely wire hangers above it. The familiar dusty and dilapidated doors and windows are full of the owner’s past poverty and today’s loneliness.

She pointed to the pressurized water well in the house and told how her grandmother used to wash her hair there when she was a child. She pointed to the cupboard where the red color had almost faded, which was where she used to wash dishes. Several large logs of wood were piled rudely inside the house, and the red clay bricks scattered outside the house were the collapsed kitchen.

After taking pictures of her grandma's house, she walked around the village a few times, but did not see the specific location of her house. Finally, she identified an empty dirt field and three piles of red bricks next to it as her "former home."

This video touched a very secret corner of my heart. I realized that this was not only a video about my hometown, but also a video about the childhood of those children who were left behind to grow up in the countryside.

"He was too tired from working. And did he die outside, in Guangdong or somewhere? Well, he was just too tired." Qiu Shui simply mentioned his father who died of overwork as a migrant worker, and then the story unfolded for all of us. You can imagine that my mother had no choice but to go out to work. In the end, my brother, sister, and her three siblings were scattered to different relatives' homes.

Two or three years later, my mother remarried, and a family of five, three brothers and sisters, lived on the move between different strange towns, which is what everyone often calls - floating population.

Floating population was also my former name. I spent my childhood in a primary school in the urban-rural fringe area on the southeastern coast. Three-quarters of the class were children of migrant workers. In their early years, they would be called "foreigners" with some discrimination. Although I am registered here, my situation is more similar to them. Because we all know what a temporary residence permit is and how much the borrowing fee is.

Most of these friends will be subject to the household registration system after primary school and return to their hometowns to attend junior high school. Some will also choose to attend junior high school in private schools. The vast majority of them will start working after completing nine-year compulsory education. Due to school dropouts, gangs, school bullying and insufficient teachers, it is not an exception for them to start their work early.

After elementary school, I already vaguely knew that life is not fair. I was lucky enough to go to a new junior high school in the local area that was OK, and then to a key middle school, and they gradually disappeared from my life. Occasionally, I also imagine their youth spent back in their hometown.

Like all naughty girls in adolescence, Qiu Shui has a lot of grudges and misunderstandings about her stepfather's role. She doesn't understand why her stepfather doesn't care about the children, why he doesn't work hard to make the family better, and he drinks and plays cards. When I was in junior high school, my family opened a handmade furniture store. The couple who worked outside learned some skills from the factory and returned to the small town to open it.

The reason why the business couldn't continue was because my stepfather was drunk and had a car accident while delivering goods. He was driving a tricycle to deliver goods, and he happened to pick up a man on the road, who was also a drunkard. When he encountered a pothole on the road, the man fell off and broke his leg. A large amount of compensation suddenly made the difficult family even worse.

"The main thing is credit for business. I can't get enough money to make furniture for hundreds or thousands of dollars, no more than small things." The talkative stepfather wouldn't refuse credit after a glass of wine. In the end, the funds could not be circulated and the business failed. Qiu Shui's family began a mobile life of renting an apartment again, changing schools frequently.

"The most common thing my mother said to me when I was young was that I had no money." The sanitary napkins Qiu Shui's mother bought were the "three noes" bulk sanitary napkins that were popularized on the Internet. At that time, she realized that after graduating from junior high school, she would only go through a process. "You must at least get a junior high school diploma before you can enter the factory." She didn't know any other choice in life.

“Money limits everything, whether it’s food, spirit, or material things.”

Qiushui has a bit of social anxiety in life, but on the Internet, she still wants to express herself and let others see her. "It doesn't matter if they see me as good or bad, they just want to be seen." Growing up, Qiu Shui would want to do something outrageous to attract his parents' attention. But at that time, her parents did not care about her at all in order to make a living. Until she transferred to another school and her father passed away, her family was still poor, which colored "retreat" as the background color of her life.

When we were talking about this, I thought that if I had not gone to a pretty good junior high school on the recommendation of the principal because of my better grades in elementary school, I might be working on an assembly line in a factory on the southeast coast right now, or in some field. Make a living in the service industry. I don’t think that if I went to a private junior high school with a mainly migrant population, with such educational resources and campus atmosphere, I would be able to exert my intelligence and talents, and still enter a key middle school through all the fog.

After entering a key middle school, my life was like the grafting of two novels, and I also concealed my childhood that was completely different from that of a middle-class urban kid. In the dark corners of life that no one pays attention to, I am still aware of "lack", aware of differences, and aware of my over-stretched nerves due to the long-term worry of falling. When faced with a choice, I often need to repeatedly confirm it to overcome my lack of confidence and shrinkage.

After watching her video, I wrote this sentence in my memo, "The daughter of a migrant population has grown up and lives in a partitioned house. Her life is intertwined with traffic. " "Children of workers and peasants", " "Blind flow" and "bottom class" are words I haven't heard for a long time.

03

County native dog

"Their life is a life that no one planned for them, so they will repeat the life of the previous generation." After finishing junior high school, they go to work, and at most high school, they work for a few years, get married and have children, and that's it.

When Qiu Shui talked about the life imagination of the workers and peasants around him, he said, "They can't even think of the word 'scarcity'. I never imagined before what the meaning of life is and what kind of spiritual satisfaction we need. All hunger is just A kind of desire for material things, wanting a lot of money, but not being able to think about what kind of life I want to live and how to get close to it.”

The small county town is full of classmates who passed the exam from rural areas, and their family status is similar to hers. In the past, within the scope of her cognition, the world was around her. After entering the big city, the gap suddenly became apparent, a falling and cliff-like gap.

"I was in the dormitory, and I desperately wanted to express myself to my roommates, but I didn't know why I was laughed at." When she was in high school, she didn't feel that she was ugly, but in the university environment, she felt that she was ugly. Qiu Shui once had severe anxiety about appearance, mixed with an inexplicable sense of strangeness.

Under the overwhelming information, Qiu Shui felt that she had become weak and shrinking, and self-denial had become the norm. She laughs at herself as a blind drifter, that is, a group of rural people who blindly move into big cities.

"I may have a little talent, but I don't know. When others think I am great, I will start to deny myself. If I were very powerful, how could I live like this?" Subconsciously, Qiu Shui felt I am a waste.

It seems that big cities cannot accommodate young people like Qiu Shui who have grown up with families that are not perfect, decent, or even flawed. But to her peers, she is already normal and lucky. Orphans, single parents, those whose fathers are very old, those who cannot bear labor, those who are disabled, and more or less disabled people are very common in small towns.

However, from the town to the county seat, there are still a group of poor people.

这个地方跟我是一样的就像我明明是一条土狗却传达出我在搞艺术，搞县城魔幻其实我无论如何都摆脱不了我土狗的本质不过我为啥要摆脱？

Qiu Shui's sister attended a health school after graduating from junior high school. She was the first to go out into society to earn money, and she advanced half of her college tuition. Her brother, who is four years older than her, bought her books and told her to persevere even if her grades were poor. Qiu Shui's elder brother had good grades, and his family gave him hope of getting into a bachelor's degree, but in the end he only went to a junior college.

In that video talking about the inferiority complex of junior college students, she mentioned that out of 40 people in each class, almost only one person can go to undergraduate school, and there may be less than 20 people in the entire grade. Teaching resources, family expectations, and living conditions all mean that learning cannot be "done well" through hard work.

"In the past few years outside, I often woke up at night, looking at the darkness around me, not knowing where I was. Lying on that bed, I didn't know what I was doing. Several times when I woke up, I thought I was I lay in my grandma’s room like I did when I was a child, and when I came back to my senses, I found that I was already in my twenties, lying in a small and cramped rental house, and had to go to work the next day.”

In the few years after graduation, she took classes for a total of two years and moved around Zhongshan, Hangzhou, Changsha and other cities, with a salary hovering between 4,000 and 5,000. Now she has a kitten, rents a one-bedroom apartment in Changsha with a monthly rent of 1,000 yuan, and has no plans to get married and have children.

Different from the traditional concept, in the information tide of the Internet, she realized that marriage and childbirth were not good for her. When she was growing up, she never saw a happy marriage.

She took a wedding video for Fa Xiao who returned to her hometown to get married, which revealed a strange feeling. She wanted to bless her but was afraid. The decision to get married was hasty and hasty, not the wedding the girl really wanted. Qiu Shui asked, "Is this the wedding you wanted?"

It cannot be said that Qiu Shui has no expectations for the meaning of his life. "Kimura Shusui" is her WeChat name, which makes people think of Nishina, a member of the Gojo band "Nural Takuya", and can't help but laugh. I was surprised when she told me that "Qiu Shui" was really her changed real name.

When she was in high school, she saw that the male protagonist of a TV series adapted from Feng Tang's novel was called "Qiu Shui" and she immediately fell in love with the name. She thought it sounded very nice and hoped that people around her would also call her Qiu Shui. It's a pity that only one friend seriously calls her that.

"Although sometimes I comfort myself, my real name was given by my grandma, and she died relatively young. After all, I didn't have much education, so I just used it, but in the end I still felt it was too vulgar." When making new friends, Qiu Shui's real name Being easily discovered made her feel inferior and decided to change it altogether.

This name was a farewell to her past self. When she got the new ID card, she really felt like she was reborn, even though it took two years to modify all the documents such as phone cards, bank cards, and degree certificates. But after changing all this, her life did not undergo any significant changes. It was just a continuation of an extremely ordinary life.

"She is still a very ordinary person. Maybe her life in the future will not be much different except for the change in age." Although she is a small blogger with 60,000 fans on the Internet, her expectations for the future are to "run for life, Then find a way to make some money.”

04

down selection

基本上我是一个隐蔽青年如何你决定同我发展我们不会经常见面见面也只是带你流浪到海边然后我会告诉你一个重点重点就是我没有钱” ——mla 《社会主义青年》

A career as a blogger is not as glamorous as everyone expected. Qiushui, which has not gained followers for a whole year, has long been stuck at 66,000 fans. It has long encountered a bottleneck for ordinary people to make videos.

Her recent updates clearly reveal her anxiety and confusion. This is of course related to the industry’s “28/20 rule”. Most resources and opportunities are focused on the head. At the same time, the economy is in recession and self-media is also at a low ebb. But Qiu Shui also clearly knew that in addition to the upper limit of her personal abilities, she also missed and gave up some things.

"Hou Cuicui just caught the push from station B and stepped on it firmly. I was still too emotional." Qiu Shui told me.

"Out of emotion", after the video to speak out about the chained woman incident was released, she no longer received push notifications. After the video she spoke out about the Shanghai Spring incident was deleted, she realized that she had been abandoned by the platform. Crossing the river by feeling the stones without anyone to guide her, she ended up getting her soles wet.

This unfashionable “integrity” is also her choice. In April, she turned down several advertising cooperations. One was a graphic advertisement that asked her to write a review without sending a product trial, and the other was an "IQ tax" product for women's private parts care. Although Qiu Shui's fan base is small and her money is not shabby, no matter how far she gets, she is not willing to make such bad money. Just like some incidents, although her voice was weak, she couldn't bear to be "silent".

"Making money is very important. When making money comes first, I really want to make money. But when faced with the price of making money, I think I'd better accept our ordinary fate." During the chat , Qiu Shui repeatedly talked about how the only thing left to do in self-media is to make money. At the same time, she also knew very clearly and pessimistically that she could not make much money.

After working in self-media for a year, if she did something simpler, like Shuishui's daily routine now, she could still maintain her desire for expression, but her videos would not gain fans. The more difficult part was very strenuous for her. She had no one to help with the filming and couldn't afford the cost, so she was caught in a tangled dilemma.

"It's a bit idealistic but quite pessimistic, but it's very easy to give up." Her self-summary is very accurate.

She is very naughty. At other times, she feels that although she and the people around her are ordinary, they are not bad enough to do assembly line work. They can still produce some creative content, but the times do not seem to provide platforms and opportunities. "I still feel a little unwilling to accept it. Even if my life is so ordinary, this ordinary life should have some splashes or ripples."

Sometimes, when meeting her friends at music festivals or live events, Qiu Shui would envy their childhood and growing environment. She daydreamed about whether she could do more things and get more of what she wanted if she had that kind of background, instead of having to be in a state of self-consistency all the time.

As a self-media person, the most negative comments Qiu Shui receives is that she is too "downward", conveys negative energy, and does not live a good life. Qiu Shui believes that this is also a state where minority groups are excluded. He is not like them, so he is excluded. "Just like many of us are thinking, the world is around us. This person's life is different from mine, how can she be different? She must be the same as me."

"When you said in the comment area that Qiu Shui is doing these things again, being confused, despondent, and a waste, you are right. I can only say that I do art. Otherwise, how can I comfort myself? How should I be in the world? To find a good medicine in this sleepy life, I can only say that this is all art."

Qiu Shui likes a passage in the movie "The Stubborn Master" very much. Zhang Guoli's girlfriend asked him to find a serious job wearing a suit and tie. He said: "I seem to be falling lightly and slowly, but you know ? Something in my soul has been sublimated."

And when I asked Qiu Shui, is "going down" the natural state after all this, or if there was an upward choice, would you still seize the opportunity and go up? She told me, "I think it's my choice. My personality is destined to be a person who will never succeed. If I give up early, I will have no expectations. If I have expectations, I will be disappointed."

She felt there was nothing wrong with this, and she didn't want to explain her downward choice.

In a recent video, Qiu Shui told viewers that she was no longer as pessimistic as before and was ready to find a class. She said matter-of-factly: "When an egg is not broken, it is an uncooked egg. When it is broken, it is art. If you go out to take photos and come home, they are all blurry. Blurry is art, and art is blurry."

Qiu Shui would say that it was a daddy art when the cat had diarrhea and couldn't bury the dumplings and trampled them all over the house.

"A little bit here, a little bit there, they can all be connected into a line."

at last.

Are college students college students? I guess many people can't answer it at all. But this group is also huge.

Social media and urban interactions have created an illusion of middle class per capita. It seems that only in some narrow moments, people pretend to "suddenly" discover - suddenly discover the admission rate of secondary vocational students, suddenly discover the narrative of "hard work will lead to success" Scam, suddenly discovered all the things beyond "respectability".

The children of the elite used their accumulated cultural capital to replace the right to speak on social media, composing the heroine's character "as long as you work hard enough, you can be independent, confident and elegant", and talking about chicken soup related to destiny.

But neither my identity nor my experience allow me not to feel angry about this. Society seems to give everyone equal opportunities, but in fact it does not give everyone the tools to seize opportunities.

At the end, I don’t intend to give anyone who has read this article a sublimation. Qiu Shui is a more self-contained person than me to some extent. She likes watching movies and poetry, and her eyes are clear when she smiles.

This is just the story of an ordinary unemployed young man. Everyone within or outside our sight is one ten millionth of the ordinary.

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