12/04/23 - They’re engineering a smoggy atmosphere, to reflect their own dark and shady heart.
A blogger posts screenshots of a mother’s post, “Even I’m starting to feel it’s not worth it for her. Starting from first grade, she spends 10 hours a day at school, with no nap in the afternoon. And as soon as she gets home, it’s homework, homework, homework. She spends 6-8 hours every weekend on homework. The teachers won’t allow any out-of-school tutoring, but every exam has a bunch of questions that they never studied. She’s only 7…it’s not like she can actually involute her way to victory. I want her to lay flat, but this little girl’s got high expectations of herself. Every time she doesn’t do well on an exam, she gets all depressed. Like, man, it’s not really worth it. She can’t help being born in Nantong. I feel bad for her.”
And there’s screenshots of the comments beneath this post too, “I feel like it’s not worth it for them either. I don’t know what they’re involuting for. No matter how hard they work, 99% of them will end up just normal people. Us 80’s kids just spent all our time running around the field with other kids and playing all summer and winter break. And we still got to high school and uni and work and now, it’s just all not worth it.”
“90’s kids too. After school, we had nothing to do except to run around outside, free as a bird. It’s not like now, where they study all day, and yet half of them have to fail middle school anyways.”
“Western elite education: stressful, but you become an elite. Western common education: it’s fun, but you become a peasant. Chinese moralistic education: stressful, and you become a peasant.”
The blogger comments, “Western fun education isn’t going to make you a peasant. It’s designed to end most people’s hope of ever getting to choose whether they become a peasant or an elite. It’s to remove choice from people.
Can China copy what the west does with education? Of course not. From a certain point of view, the system we have is just an answer to Chinese parents wanting their kids to have a bright future. It provides a chance for change. The reality is, we don’t have enough resources for everyone to live free and comfortably. So we can only give people a chance to fight for the opportunity to live free and comfortably.
If you don’t want to involute, you can send her to school and pick her up on time every day, and never sign her up for any tutoring, or even just stop doing homework entire. But if you do so, are other parents going to do the same? Most people talk about how they envy carefree education, but in reality, they can’t accept that the children are destined to be ordinary.”
Comments say, “A fair education is meant to be where everyone studies the same curriculum, takes the same test, and have the same chance to succeed. It’s not about the difficulty of the test itself. The difficulty of the test is just the result of involution.”
“So how come Beijing doesn’t get harder tests then?”
“If you want to enjoy carefree education, you can just free range your kids. If you don’t turn in homework, there’s nothing a primary school teacher can really do about you. But if you don’t work hard, that doesn’t mean other people aren’t working hard. And if you don’t work hard when you’re young and healthy, then is it any better to grow up and complain about not being able to afford a house, or treat your sickness, or get married?”
“A lot of people have asked me: what areas of China aren’t sexist?
I think that literally every state has been nominated for being least sexist, for all kinds of reasons, but none of it really matters. It’s nothing but delusion.
The simplest standard for judging whether or not an area is “sexist” is to look at how many female judges, female prosecutors, female civil servants, female bosses, female people’s representatives, and female billionaires there are, and whether they outnumber men. Or, really, not even outnumber men. Just match with their numbers proportionally speaking by demographics.
And if you go by those standards, then the answer is simple: Nowhere in China is not sexist.”
Comments say, “I always thought my region wasn’t sexist, because almost all my classmates growing up were only children, and the gender divide in my class was always pretty even. Then, when I was in uni, the second child policy got released, and a ton of people started preparing for a second pregnancy to have a son. It turns out, we just had a very strictly enforced one child policy.”
“Another criteria, whether men marry into the woman’s family more often, or women marry into the man’s family. Whether children take their mother’s surname as frequently as their father’s. That’s true equality. But this scenario basically never happens in real life. It only happens in romance novels.”
“I don’t know if people have read Misogynism [a book]. There’s a line in it that no one in society can really not be misogynistic. Even women themselves are misogynists. So sexism is bound to exist, it’s just a matter of degree.”
“A lot of women who write time-travel novels, where their self-insert travels back to the past and turns into a Princess, or a noblewoman or something, is basically just fulfilling the fantasy of being an elite. In modern society, everyone is equal, and this fantasy can never be fulfilled, so they fantasise about travelling back into the past instead.
These women never seem to realise that even if they ended up in the past, they’re still second-class citizens compared to men. We won’t talk about that, for now. Even if you really became a Princess or noble Lady or whatever, you can still pass away from a minor little disease that could get cured in a few days in the modern day. Lin Daiyu [protagonist of Dream of the Red Chamber] had tuberculosis. In modern society, there’s no way she would die. But in the Qing Dynasty, as the only main branch daughter of a wealthy tycoon, she was still doomed. In the past, even a simple ovarian cyst was something that could kill.
Okay, forget about disease. Even childbirth, maternal mortality rate was 20%. Are you sure you’re not going to be that 20%?
Okay, even if you’re super, super lucky and you dodge all the ways you could die, could you still hop on a plane and fly all around the world in a single day? Are there high speed trains in the past? Can you scroll tiktok?
Honestly, across the five millennia of Chinese history, the modern day is the most friendly period towards women. As a modern day person, as a modern-day woman, you should be endlessly grateful that you weren’t born in the past. Why would you want to travel back? I don’t get it.”
Comments say, “Just the fact that there’s no internet or electricity or toilets is enough to turn me off.”
“Right? Just think about how horrible going to the bathroom would be. That’s always my first reaction.”
“I just feel bad reading time travel stories. Like, there’s not even good food. I would die.”
“Month-Sitting Centres: A Consumerist Trap:
This topic does not apply to billionaires. If you’re a billionaire, you can move on.
Right now, whenever people have a kid, no matter what their family’s economic situation is, everyone’s first reaction seems to be to check out a month-sitting centre. Among my friends and coworkers, for the past two years, all of them have went without exception. But…sorry, I’m here to rain on everyone’s parade.
When people are picking out a month-sitting centre, most people are chasing after a myth: that they’ll let the new mother rest better, and they can do postpartum recovery therapy.
I’ll use myself as an example. To save myself hassle, I spent five figures on a 24-hour month-sitting centre with one-on-one month-sitting nurse support (which is a medium to low-end price for my region). But I didn’t discover all the problems until I’d left for two months.
First, to control their own costs, the month-sitting nurses that these centres hire are never super experienced. The lady who was assigned to me was only 26 years old, and had never married or had kids of her own. She had no idea how to help the baby sleep on her own and form good sleeping habits. It’s to the point that my daughter never slept alone, and was rocked to sleep every time. When I left the centre and came home, I found out she was impossible to put to sleep.
And then there’s the supposed postpartum recovery. If you do some basic research, you can find that most true recovery work can’t be done within 42 days of giving birth anyways. At most, they can wash your hair, put a hot pad on your stomach, and do some moxibustion. There’s not much of a point to it, and certainly isn’t worth spending a grand a day to experience.
Third, it might be really cool when you first check in to the centre, but as time goes on, it becomes like sitting in prison. Every day, you’re counting down when you get to leave. I think everyone who’s been to a month-sitting centre knows what I’m talking about.
And a lot of people seem to think that if you go to a month-sitting centre, then you’ll get good rest. Anyone who thinks this, make sure you choose to bottle-feed only. Because if you’re breastfeeding, then you’re not gonna get to sleep at night. Newborns have to be fed 2-3 hours. If you don’t have enough milk, then you have to get them latched even more frequently to stimulate milk production. You can’t really get any time off. And if you pick a month-sitting centre where they keep mother and babies separated, and they don’t charge you a lot of money, then I recommend you don’t take that risk.
What I really want to say is, as people’s financial situations improve, a lot of young people’s spending philosophy is that they have to “treat” themselves. They’ll only give birth probably once in their lifetime, they want to experience what it’s like to be treated like a queen.
And I guess a lot of people are just following the crowd too. They see everyone else they know going to a month-sitting centre, so they never really reflected whether they’re falling into a consumerist trap.
Of course, it’s different if you’re rich. But if you’re not super wealthy, and you can’t afford to go to an actual nice month-sitting centre, then I think you’re better off hiring an experienced month-sitting nurse.
You could do a lot of stuff with 30-40 grand. I really suggest not-so-well-off gals out there, to think carefully before spending that money, to be a rationalist consumer.”
Comments say, “No, the purpose of a month-sitting centre, is to come in when you’re at your most physically and emotionally vulnerable in that first month, to mediate any internal drama in your family. You can block your own mother and your mother-in-law from their supposed “childcare advice”, and ignore your husband’s disappointing performance as a new daddy which somehow manages to update your definition of incompetence on a daily basis.”
“Hired a gold medalist month-sitting nurse, who’s qualified as a lactation specialist too. I buy groceries online and have them delivered to my door, and got to eat whatever I want. It was awesome. And month-sitting centres are so expensive. You could hire a month-sitting nurse for 2-3 months for that kind of money.”
“No way. Was this written by a man? My coworkers who went to a month-sitting centre couldn’t stop singing praises about it. And everyone who didn’t go spent their whole month angry and depressed—and she even had nice in-laws and a helpful husband.”
“I’ve always wondered, like, women, in modern society, really shouldn’t be housewives anymore? Is that right? Like, all the women who’ve walked out of the mountains, they have to accomplish something with their life, have to become a “girl boss”, and can’t become a housewife? Or else, they’re a disappointment to their sponsor? I don’t get it.”
Comments say, “Feminism is just a fashion trend.”
“Then you go be a househusband. If you don’t like it, then start by changing yourself. Maybe you’ll move some people into actually listening to you that way.”
“What, so they’re meant to work themselves to the bone studying to escape from the mountains, just to become a housewife with no insurance, no social security, no protection from labour laws, who has to beg for every cent she has? Is that really fair to all the studying they did?”
“I was just talking with a classmate of mine who went to Japan, and she says that right now, Japanese society is all low on children, ageing population, economic stagnation, rising costs, shrinking assets, spending is plummeting, everyone’s otakuing, no one wants to marry or buy houses or have kids. The youth have lost their ambitions and ideals, they lack any enthusiasm for work. One out of every 3 people is an old person above 65-years-old, and less and less people are actually creating value, and more and more people are monopolising and wasting societal wealth…is it really true?”
Comments say, “We’re the same way too XD”
“Least their stock market is doing well. I don’t think their economy is too bad off.”
“Once they lose their automobile industry, they won’t even be able to maintain the current status quo.”
“American cameras are amazing. Every time they take a photo in China, they automatically make you feel like you’ve travelled 30 years into the past.”
Comments say, “They’re engineering a smoggy atmosphere, to reflect their own dark and shady heart.”
“America: rather than improving myself, I’d rather slander everyone else.”
“This kind of trickery really reveals the bone-deep insecurity of Americans.”
A blogger posts a screenshot which reads, “I’ve got a friend who says he has it from a very reliable source that in Haiding [a borough of Beijing], out of all the kids who are school-age who should be going to school, over 2000 of them are taking a long-term leave at home for psychological reasons. That number stunned the whole table into silence.”
The blogger writes, “I really want education to stop being so involuted, and we can actually let kids discover what they’re truly passionate about and teach them in a way they can understand.”
Comments say, “It’s pointless though, because schools aren’t the ones involuting, it’s the parents. So long as these parents exist, no matter how much you reform education, there’s no point. Carefree education would only make it harder for students without resources to compete on fair grounds.”
“We’ve had several kids commit suicide this semester. Don’t know what’s wrong with them.”