My wife has been staring at my hair and my face and nagging me lately, saying I’ve got more white hairs and I’ve broken out with acne on my face. Her tone was full of worry, and she asked whether I’d been secretly anxious about not finding a job. I smiled and shook my head, saying “I’m really fine” out loud, and in my heart I really did feel that way—the acne is probably just because I’ve been drinking coffee so often lately; once I stop the coffee, I’ll sleep much more soundly. As for the white hair, perhaps it’s just an ordinary mark of the years, nothing to do with anxiety, and even less to do with feeling lost.
In the blink of an eye, I’ve been unemployed for nearly four full months. The people around me might think that a 35-year-old who’s been laid off and can’t find work for a long time should be panicking, should be wearing himself down inside, should just grab any job to “make ends meet” first, rather than living off just over 2,300 yuan a month in unemployment assistance. But only I myself know that this seemingly “stagnant” stretch of time has been far more fulfilling and far more meaningful than I imagined.
Without the shackles of a nine-to-five, without the internal friction and compromises of the workplace, I’ve had a great deal of freely disposable time—and I haven’t used this time to slack off, or to be anxious and wear myself down. Instead, I’ve given it all to exercise, reading, and learning. Every day I exercise regularly, waking up my body’s vitality; I settle down and read all kinds of books—reading the patterns of an era from history, seeing the logic of reality from economics, touching the possibilities of the future from technology; bit by bit I try new skills, bit by bit I update my own cognition, slowly filling in the gaps in my growth that had been squeezed out by work in the past.
Many people, when they mention being laid off at 35, carry a trace of pity, feeling that this is life’s “Waterloo,” an insurmountable “midlife crisis.” But I’ve always felt that the word “crisis” inherently holds both “danger” and “opportunity.” The “danger” has already happened—being laid off, being forced off a familiar track, falling into a temporary predicament of unemployment; but the “opportunity” has come along with it too. This sudden gap has given me a chance to stop, to think, to settle, and to restart.
I’ve never felt that temporary unemployment is a kind of failure. It’s more like a “farewell”—a farewell to the fate that bound me to my former company, a farewell to a job that had long since hit its ceiling and had gradually numbed me, a farewell to the version of myself that was slowly sinking in the warm water. Being laid off at 35 isn’t the endpoint; it’s a starting point that lets me reexamine myself and plan my future.
People around me have also asked: since you’ve been unemployed so long, why not just casually find a job and do it for now? It’s not that I don’t want to—it’s that I’m unwilling to settle, and even more unwilling to waste my own time and energy. To sum it up, the reason I’ve been slow to find a suitable job comes down to three reasons, each of which hides my persistence and clarity.
First, when I choose a job, I value mutual fit more than simply “having a job.” A company once offered me a salary of 15,000, and I refused without hesitation—this salary was directly half of what I earned before, and anyone can see that this is taking advantage of the bad economic environment to push the price down. I know the job market is tough right now, but that doesn’t mean I should give up my salary bottom line and professional dignity, and demean myself with a job that’s extremely poor value and offers no respect whatsoever. Rather than settle, I’d rather wait; rather than burn myself out, I’d rather settle and accumulate.
Second, I fundamentally reject outsourcing positions. Open BOSS Zhipin, and almost everything you swipe to is outsourcing positions, densely packed, and not a single one catches my eye. In my view, an outsourcing position is never a “transition”—it’s “consumption.” Not only does it make you feel inferior, but more importantly, you can’t learn anything truly valuable there. Day after day you repeat mechanical work, and in the end you may still not escape being laid off—you might even have to go back and forth through arbitration over issues like social insurance and salary, wasting time and energy. Such consumption I can’t bear, and I’m unwilling to bear.
Third, I want to transform, to step out of my comfort zone, to break through my career ceiling. What I did before wasn’t an ordinary frontline technical support position—that kind of job that’s just taking tickets and isn’t much different from customer service has never interested me; what I did was internal system development. But even so, I know full well that this job had long since hit its ceiling for me, and switching to another company to keep doing the same old thing would just be repeating my past life in a different place—it wouldn’t last long before I’d feel bored, numb, and utterly lacking in growth.
If I don’t take advantage of this unemployment to really think about the question of transformation, and don’t proactively learn new skills and broaden my boundaries, then in the future I’ll still be like a frog in warm water, muddling along in place waiting to die. Being laid off at 35, if I don’t change in time, then at 40, at 50, I might still have accumulated nothing, and still be eliminated by the times.
It’s just that the current job market is truly exasperating and disappointing. I often feel this employment environment is too “fucking stupid”—whatever you’ve done before, you have to keep doing forever; for positions you haven’t done, they won’t even give you a chance to try; once you’re older, you’re disdained; if your salary demands are a little higher, you’re rejected. What companies want is never “talent,” but “vertical-type screws”—use and discard, no growth needed, you only need to do your own little patch of work; no need to think, no need to break through, and even less need for any possibility of crossing boundaries.
In the end, it’s simply that there are too many people, an oversupply of labor, and once companies have more choices, they start to become picky and short-sighted, forgetting that the value of talent was never about “whether you’ve done exactly the same thing,” but about learning ability, adaptability—about whether you have the potential to grow. And it’s precisely because I’ve seen through all this that I’ve become all the more firm in my own thinking—no compromise, no settling, no internal friction; take advantage of this free stretch of time to properly settle myself and prepare for transformation.
As for completeness in the worldly sense—marriage, having children—I actually understand today’s young people who haven’t married or had children yet. In an environment like this, so full of involution and pressure, so disrespectful of laborers, where everyone is being consumed, only a fool would blindly follow the trend, shouldering enormous pressure to form a family and raise children. Rather than bring a child into this world to repeat a life of involution, anxiety, and being at the mercy of circumstance, it’s better to just live your own life well—single, clear-headed, free, and unhurried, and that’s enough. Although I got married N years ago and now have a family and a child, in the future I won’t demand that my child walk this path, and I don’t want to push him into the rat race either. I only hope he’s healthy; everything else, let fate decide. Rather than be a leek cut down at will, it’s better to live your own days happily. Right now I feel that cultivating the mind may be more important than how much money you earn. Look at those people who work 996 and literally kill themselves, dying suddenly—maybe they think they lived worthily, but I don’t think it was worth it.
Four months unemployed, I haven’t been anxious, I haven’t slacked off; instead, in this “crisis,” I’ve recovered the self I’d long since lost. I know the road to transformation is hard, and the process of waiting for a suitable job is long, but I’m not in a hurry, and I’m not panicking. Take it slow, settle down, let every step be solid and firm, and every bit of learning and growth is paving the road for my future self.
Temporary unemployment never means anything. It’s just a small interlude on the road of life, an opportunity that lets us stop and set out again. May everyone like me, who hits unemployment at 35 and faces transformation, be able to avoid being dragged around by anxiety, avoid being kidnapped by worldly expectations, seek “opportunity” within “danger,” grow amid settling, and live as the person they like, live as a self with more confidence and inner strength.
This video on Bilibili is quite interesting: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1XCoUBiE2w/?spm_id_from=333.788.top_right_bar_window_history.content.click&vd_source=1c71906f998923e101bc066e2dee3ce6
Sometimes I feel like working as a wage earner is really pointless.
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