Every Ordinary Person's Predicament Is the Inevitable Result of Unbalanced Distribution

It isn’t that we don’t work hard enough — it’s the extremely unbalanced rules of social distribution.

I’m 35 this year, and I’ve just been through the most bone-chilling six months of unemployment in my life.

During those six months I didn’t lie flat and give up, and I didn’t wallow in negative complaints. Every day I refreshed the recruitment apps, sent out resumes, went to interviews and had conversations. I never once stopped looking for work. But reality gave me the coldest possible answer: it isn’t that there are no jobs — it’s that there are no jobs that match the value of your labor or the pressure of your living costs. The only positions left on the market uniformly cut pay in half: salary halved, benefits shrunk, responsibilities doubled, all of them “garbage jobs” that over-extract from ordinary people. Good jobs never circulate on the market. What circulates is all bad jobs — all of them requiring you to burn enormous energy and spirit just to trade for a barely-subsistence wage.

It isn’t that the market lacks openings; it’s that openings which fairly reward your effort and can carry your living expenses have all but vanished. Look across the public recruitment channels and the mainstream options are all disguised over-extraction: pay slashed straight down the middle, social insurance and housing fund, two-day weekends, and allowances all shrunk layer after layer, while job responsibilities pile on without limit — one person doing the work of two or three for the lowest salary. Outsourced roles of every kind are worst: heavy responsibility, weak protection, replaceable at any moment. You burn through your time and your strength and get back just barely enough to scrape by, with no margin at all for the mortgage, family expenses, or everyday medical care.

The genuinely stable, fairly paid positions where authority and responsibility match are mostly absorbed internally or filled through acquaintance referrals; they simply never get posted on recruitment platforms in volume. What flows into the open market is mostly “consumption-type jobs” — roles where companies don’t want to invest cost and only want to compress labor spending.

Ordinary people are trapped in a double bind: swallow your pride and accept a halved salary, and you’ll be overdrawing your body and mind long term, consumed day after day by high-intensity work. Refuse to compromise and keep job-hunting and waiting, and you have to shoulder on your own the drain on your savings, the weight of living costs, and age anxiety. Both directions are torment.

At thirty-five you have aging parents above and young children below, decades of mortgage on your back, and a whole family’s food and fuel, school fees, medical insurance, and social security to carry. I worked diligently for over a decade, never slacking, never coasting, going deep in the industry and accumulating experience. I should have been the backbone of the workplace and the pillar of my family — and instead, at the middle-age milestone, I was ruthlessly discarded by the market.

That ordeal punched straight through the surface-level employment anxiety and let me see clearly the ultimate root of every ordinary person’s hardship: it isn’t that we don’t work hard enough — it’s the extremely unbalanced rules of social distribution.

1. A Two-Way Asymmetric Distribution System

The most absurd, most unjust economic reality right now is a two-way asymmetric system for distributing risk and return, purpose-built to harvest the 80% of ordinary workers and feed the 20% who are vested interests.

A worker’s income is “dynamically fallible,” and the risk is entirely backstopped by ordinary people. When the economy turns down and corporate earnings fluctuate, the first ones cut are always the wage earners. Companies can lay off staff at will, cut pay unconditionally, squeeze performance bonuses, “optimize” positions, and even switch to outsourcing at scale — completely shedding the employment responsibilities a company ought to bear. Middle-aged workers are the first to become the sacrifice.

A huge number of jobs on the market show extreme equal work, unequal pay: exactly the same position, exactly the same content, exactly the same hours — yet the salary, benefits, protections, and promotion prospects of a regular employee versus an outsourced worker are worlds apart. Companies use this to split up labor costs and pass operating risk along, over-extracting the maximum possible value from bottom-tier labor.

My monthly salary was cut straight in half from a stable level. More than a decade of industry experience and workplace accumulation is worth nothing in the face of age discrimination and capital compression.

What’s crueller is that this pay cut comes with no safety net, no compensation, and no room to negotiate. When the market is bad and corporate profits slide, operating risk is transferred 100% to the workers at the bottom, and we — with more than a decade of diligence — bear the entire cost of capital’s pursuit of profit. Labor income has no stability whatsoever; it can go up or down, can exist or not. The labor of ordinary people is the cheapest, most passive, least protected resource in the whole economic system.

2. The Parallel Logic of Big-Tech Layoffs and Hiring: A Structural Cage-Swap

During these six months I also saw another deeply contradictory phenomenon: nearly every big tech company is chanting “organizational optimization” and “cost reduction and efficiency gains,” layoff news keeps breaking on social media — and yet the same companies post huge numbers of open headcount on recruitment platforms, never stopping their high-salary talent grabs.

A lot of people don’t get it: if you’re laying off, why are you still hiring? The answer is — the core issue isn’t a shortage of people; it’s a structural cage-swap. Layoffs and hiring are two entirely separate logics, two categories of people, two business lines. You have to look at them separately.

1. Business lines split between fire and ice: stop the losses on one side, bet on new tracks on the other

Big tech runs dozens of business lines at once. The ones making money expand headcount; the ones losing money cut it. The two don’t conflict.

Segments being cut: old businesses that have burned cash for years without profit, whose growth has peaked, or that have been replaced by AI — community group buying, offline local services, traditional content moderation, repetitive operations, legacy back-office systems, inefficient middle management, plus failed innovation projects like the metaverse and offline education. These departments are often eliminated group by group, with only one goal: cut the labor cost that keeps losing money.

Segments hiring frantically: AI large models, compute, algorithms, overseas business, short video, cloud services, autonomous driving, smart hardware. These are the company’s core future strategy, and they keep releasing high-salary headcount to fight over scarce technical talent.

A simple analogy: an aircraft carrier strips out its old guns to shed weight while simultaneously installing an electromagnetic catapult — removal and installation happening at the same time.

2. Blood transfusion on labor cost: phase out high-salary veterans, replace them with better-value newcomers

This is the point workers feel most painfully. In essence it’s compressing per-capita labor spending.

Profile of those “optimized”: long tenure, high annual salary, heavy fixed cost, positions that can be standardized and replaced, weak willingness to learn new technology. Many of these people earn far above the current market rate for the same role, and the social insurance, year-end bonus, and severance costs the company carries for them are higher too.

Advantages of the newly hired:

• Fresh graduates / young technical hires: total comp is 15%–30% below that of same-age veterans, tolerance for overtime is higher, no family drag, and they adapt more easily to new AI tools;
• Outsourcing / contract labor replacing full-time: cut the fixed headcount and switch to hourly or project-based outsourcing, with no housing fund, no severance, no paid leave — a large reduction in long-term labor cost.

There’s also a hidden purpose: continuously bringing new people in creates internal competitive pressure, forcing incumbent veterans to involute on their own initiative and take on more work, and indirectly driving down everyone’s bargaining power.

3. AI replacement: cut repetitive human labor, shift the budget to technical talent

The current layoff wave is deeply bound to AI — it’s an operation of trading people for compute.

Large numbers of repetitive roles — data labeling, basic reporting, simple code, first-pass customer service, image-and-text editing — can be replaced with automation and AI tools; there’s no need to maintain a huge base-level team. The labor budget saved by cutting those base roles is all moved over to hiring AI algorithm, architecture, and compute engineers.

The corporate logic is blunt: one AI expert plus tooling can replace 3–5 base-level execution employees of the past, with lower long-term cost and higher output efficiency.

4. Listed-company reporting needs: artificially optimize the statements, please the capital markets

Most big tech companies are listed, and labor cost directly affects net profit and share price.

Concentrated layoffs can quickly cut salary, year-end bonus, and social insurance spending, boosting book profit in the short term. Publicly announcing “focusing on AI, positioning for the future” while simultaneously hiring high-end talent sends investors a signal that the transformation is going well and steadies the share price. Laying people off under the names of “organizational optimization” and “bottom-of-the-stack performance elimination” also sidesteps the public-opinion risk of mass layoffs.

5. Job mismatch: cut generic roles, hire scarce specialist roles

This happens to match exactly what I experienced while job-hunting:

The roles being cut and flooding the market: generic operations, admin, base-level development, customer service, middle management. Low barrier to entry, explosive supply, and companies can cut pay and split responsibilities at will — these are what I call “garbage outsourced jobs.”

The quality roles big tech is short of and that rarely leak out: large models, chips, overseas commercialization, core architecture. Big talent gaps, stable pay, and mostly absorbed through internal referral, rarely posted in volume on recruitment apps.

The result is a split situation: on one side huge numbers of ordinary people get optimized out and, when job-hunting, can only run into halved-salary roles; on the other side big tech pays high salaries to fight over a small number of top technical people.

6. The truth that stings

Big tech lays off ordinary people who are replaceable, high-cost, and low-growth, and hires scarce talent who are irreplaceable and support future tracks.

What flows out onto the market is all backstop roles that companies want to compress cost on and squeeze as hard as possible. The roles that genuinely match the value of labor, with authority and responsibility in balance, are never put into the public recruitment pool at all. No matter how desperately ordinary people apply, it’s hard to break out of this structural trap.

3. “Everyone Over 35 Is an Old Fox”: Capital’s Systematic Stigmatization

In the process of layoffs and price-cutting, companies also have a very handy script — lumping everyone over 35 together as “old foxes.”

That sentence isn’t an objective assessment. It’s a systematic stigmatization carefully manufactured by capital, a public-opinion excuse created for low-cost blood transfusion and over-extraction from workers.

1. Real “old foxes” have nothing to do with being 35

The few people at work who coast through the day, dodge and shift blame, lie flat and slack off exist at every age: twenty-somethings who phone it in for a base salary and do their work perfunctorily are hardly rare either.

The traits the 35-year-old cohort generally has ought to be workplace advantages:

• Mature in the business, having stepped in a great many pits, able to avoid risk and backstop a project;
• Emotionally stable, not impulsive over painted pies, not burning out in internal friction;
• Understands boundaries, can tell their own job from meaningless unpaid overtime;
• Clear about the price of labor, knows what their experience is worth, and refuses unlimited overdrawing.

But companies and capital swap the concepts, turning these traits of maturity, rationality, and self-protection into “slick, no drive, won’t obey management, won’t dedicate themselves,” and slap the “old fox” label on all of them uniformly.

2. The three layers of real calculation behind capital’s stigmatization

Layer one: manufacturing legitimacy for pay cuts, layoffs, and replacing older employees

A 35-year-old employee has long tenure and higher pay; for the same role, salary is generally 1.5–2 times that of a newcomer, and social insurance, annual leave, and severance costs are higher too. Companies want to complete the “cage-swap”: lay off high-paid middle-aged people, hire low-priced young people, cut labor cost directly, and beautify the financial statements.

But saying outright “we think your salary is too expensive” sounds bad and easily triggers labor disputes and public backlash. So they invent a script:

“You’ve gotten slick with age, you have no wolf spirit, you don’t work overtime, you can’t keep up with development, so you have to be optimized.”

They package the company’s cost calculation as the employee’s own ability and mindset problem, making middle-aged people doubt themselves, even accept pay cuts on their own initiative and resign voluntarily, reducing severance and conflict.

Layer two: crushing workers’ bargaining power, destroying the sense of boundaries

Capital loves labor it can “over-extract from at will”: young people have a big information gap, believe in the painted pie, are willing to work unpaid overtime, don’t dare refuse unreasonable demands, and have weak awareness of their rights.

A 35-year-old has already seen through the workplace playbook: won’t sacrifice rest for verbal promises; can distinguish their actual job from a leader’s personal errands; demands compensation for overtime and asks for a raise when overloaded; dares to speak up and refuse when the allocation is unreasonable.

In the eyes of a crude, over-extracting company, knowing how to protect your own rights = refusing to cooperate with over-extraction = old fox.

As this label keeps spreading, it forms a social consensus: middle-aged people are “hard to manage, high-maintenance, poor value.” Companies naturally cut prices when hiring, and only halved-salary, doubled-responsibility roles remain on the market — a perfect match for the predicament I’m facing in my job search right now.

Layer three: manufacturing generational conflict, deflecting the contradiction

They deliberately shape an oppositional image of “young and ambitious versus middle-aged and lying flat”: hyping fresh graduates as energetic and able to take hardship while disparaging middle-aged people as greasy and lazy.

Young people come to assume that being eliminated at 35 is deserved, not seeing that they’ll face the same age threshold in the future; middle-aged people sink into self-denial and don’t go on to question the systemic problem of companies’ bottomless overtime and over-extracted pay. The contradiction gets shifted from capital’s labor logic onto the mutual prejudices of workers of different ages.

3. Exposing the two classic lies that stigmatize 35-year-olds

Lie 1: At 35 you have poor energy and learn slowly, you can’t keep up with new technology

The truth is that energy comes in two kinds: one is overdrawing all-nighter internal friction, the other is solving problems efficiently.

A lot of middle-aged people simply don’t want to stay up for nothing, but their overall ability to handle complex business, coordinate projects, and land long-term work far exceeds that of young people who only know execution. Technical iteration has never had anything to do with age — only with whether you keep learning. Plenty of technical professionals over 35 are going deep on AI, cloud native, and the architecture frontier. Companies deliberately magnify the few individuals who have stagnated and generalize to the whole group.

Honestly, when I was young I was led astray by this script too. Back then I always felt that older people had weak willingness to learn, couldn’t keep up with the times, and deserved to be eliminated. It wasn’t until I reached the 35 milestone myself and saw with my own eyes how many middle-aged people around me are still actively learning AI, studying new tools, and updating their tech stacks that I understood it’s nothing more than a label capital has stuck on an age threshold. The ones who truly stop learning have never been a particular age group — they’re the individuals who have been over-extracted to exhaustion and denied until they go numb.

Lie 2: At 35 you’re worried about family, so you can’t throw yourself fully into work

Having parents above and children below is an objective reality, but that doesn’t mean work output declines.

What capital actually wants is consumable material stripped of all family responsibility, on call 24 hours, overdrawing the body at any cost — not a mature worker who can balance life and produce steadily over the long term. Stigmatizing ordinary people’s normal family responsibilities as “a drag on work, no career ambition” is essentially a refusal to acknowledge that workers have a right to a private life.

4. The real-world closed loop, tied to my own job-hunting situation

Most of the roles circulating on the market are over-extractive outsourced and base-execution jobs, and companies’ hiring standard has only one line: low cost, high obedience.

1. A 35-year-old job-seeker comes pre-loaded with the “old fox” stigma filter, and HR immediately pushes down the salary expectation;
2. If you ask for a reasonable salary and refuse bottomless overtime, the company takes that as confirmation of the stereotype and eliminates you outright;
3. Only someone willing to accept a halved salary and take on the entire excess workload gets the offer;
4. The quality roles that genuinely need experience and value coordination and backstopping ability are absorbed internally and never circulate outside at all.

Put simply: “old fox” isn’t an objective assessment — it’s an instrumental term capital uses to rationalize age discrimination and push down the price of middle-aged labor.

Not blindly overdrawing yourself, not being swept along by painted pies, being clear about the value of your own labor — that’s called mature professionalism. Only capital that wants to over-extract from employees without limit and refuses to pay an equivalent reward will smear that clarity as being an “old fox.”

4. Still Doing Execution Work at 35 Doesn’t Mean You’re Incompetent: The Truth About the Scarcity of Management Roles

Besides “old fox,” there’s another common stigmatizing script: “You’re 35 and still doing base-level execution work; you haven’t been promoted in all these years, so it must be that your ability isn’t up to it.”

That logic needs exposing too. Promotion has never depended only on personal effort; the number of management slots is the hard ceiling.

1. Management roles are themselves an extremely scarce resource

In the overwhelming majority of ordinary companies — especially in internet, tech, and outsourcing — management headcount is a pyramid: a huge base of execution staff, with slots collapsing cliff-like as you go up. A department may have a dozen or several dozen execution people and only 1–2 supervisors or managers, and the director tier is even sparser. Headcount slots don’t multiply out of thin air just because you work hard.

In recent years, with the industry turning down, a company’s first cut is management — trimming middle-layer headcount. Merging departments, eliminating redundant management posts, freezing promotion channels; many companies only retain existing managers and no longer open up advancement at all. Even if your performance hits target and your seniority is sufficient, if nobody above resigns and there’s no expansion, no matter how excellent you are, you can’t move up. That’s a question of company structure and has nothing to do with individual ability.

Promotion also carries strong constraints of luck, timing, and interpersonal relationships: whether the department gets a new project, whether your old leader gets reassigned, whether the company expands the team, the boss’s preferences in hiring — all of it uncontrollable external conditions. Attributing all of that to “not ambitious” is itself a prejudice divorced from reality.

2. Why does capital push the narrative that “not becoming a manager means failure”?

The core purpose of this script is to establish a single yardstick of success and deny the value of execution roles.

A company’s operations can never do without a mature execution layer. Leading a team into management is only one route; going deep on a specialty and landing complex work at a high level is another, equally important track. But companies deliberately elevate management roles and belittle senior execution, creating the illusion that “only managing people counts as having ability,” forcing everyone to involute frantically and fight over a tiny number of management slots. For the sake of promotion, people volunteer for unpaid overtime and take on extra work, and the company extracts labor at zero cost.

More realistically, when a company wants to optimize out senior execution staff over 35, this script is a ready-made excuse: “Still doing base-level execution in your thirties, no promotion in all these years, no growth in ability.” It ignores the objective realities of industry-wide downsizing, frozen management slots, and no vacancies, blames the entire structural predicament on the individual, and then, as a matter of course, pushes down salary, refuses to hire, or lays people off.

3. “Rising in rank and pay” does not equal “a team-leading management role”

A great many companies actually run a dual-track promotion system:

• Management track: lead people, be responsible for a team (very few slots);
• Specialist track: senior specialist, principal expert — rank and salary benchmarked against middle management, no need to manage anyone.

I myself am a typical specialist-track promotion: three consecutive years of raises at my last company, and my rank reached the same level as my direct manager. The company recognized my value through continuous raises. There simply wasn’t a management slot, so there was no opportunity to go higher. Does that mean I didn’t work hard or wasn’t ambitious? Obviously not.

But the outside world and HR deliberately ignore specialist-track growth and judge a person’s value only by “did you become an official,” deliberately narrowing the standard of evaluation. That is classic one-sided stigmatization.

4. The objective reality that ordinary people find it hard to reach management roles

• The market is contracting overall: ten years ago the industry was growing fast, companies kept opening new businesses and new teams, and management roles kept being added; now it’s stock competition, companies only shrink and don’t expand, existing management firmly holds the slots, and without resignations there are no vacancies.
• Management roles cost more to staff: managers have higher base pay, more allowances, and larger room for raises. When conditions are bad, companies only strictly control management headcount, preferring to spread the work across senior execution staff rather than add a management post.
• Not everyone is suited to management, or wants it: management means coordinating interpersonal relationships, handling reporting, carrying business metrics. Plenty of people who go deep on technology, operations, and hands-on work are good at landing solutions to hard problems and dislike maneuvering and internal friction, so they choose the specialist track on their own initiative. Yet companies distort “doesn’t want to manage people” into “has no ability to be promoted.”

5. Denying senior execution people by a single standard is stigmatization

I got raises three years running, my rank caught up with my direct manager, and the company recognized the value of my work over the long term. That’s proof enough that I kept improving and produced steadily. It isn’t that I didn’t work hard or that my ability couldn’t keep up — it’s that the company’s management headcount is fixed, the industry keeps downsizing, and there are no vacant promotion slots.

Management roles are a scarce resource by nature; it’s impossible for every employee who has gone deep for years to get a chance to lead a team. Mature, senior execution staff are an indispensable core force in a company, and you can’t define a person’s value by the single standard of “did they become a manager.”

Judging other people by “still doing execution at 35 means low ability,” while ignoring the industry environment, the company structure, and the dual-track promotion rules, is purely a one-sided stigma divorced from reality — nothing more than a script companies use to rationalize age discrimination, price-cutting, and layoffs.

5. Absorbing Fresh Graduates and Sacrificing the Middle-Aged: A Complete Blood-Transfusion Loop

Here you can actually see a more complete circular logic: on one side, dilute the price of labor with a flood of fresh graduates; on the other, complete the blood transfusion by stigmatizing middle-aged people as “old foxes.” The so-called absorption of fresh graduates to stabilize employment is essentially the stacking of two sets of demands — the corporate and the macro — with middle-aged people becoming the sacrifice in between.

1. At the macro level: companies are needed to take on graduates and ease youth employment pressure

Every year tens of millions of college graduates pour into the market, and youth unemployment is a key stability-preservation metric.

At the policy level, campus-recruitment subsidies, tax preferences, and hukou quotas are used to encourage big tech and companies of all kinds to expand hiring of fresh graduates; state-owned enterprises, public institutions, and big-tech campus recruitment all carry hard headcount requirements. Young people have just left campus, have no survival-backstop pressure and low demands, and as long as there’s a job, the employment numbers look good — stabilizing the mood of the youth cohort in the short term and avoiding the social problems that large-scale youth idleness would bring.

But policy only requires “providing positions”; it doesn’t force companies to offer salaries matching the cost of living or complete protections. Companies seize that loophole and turn campus recruitment into a low-cost labor reservoir.

2. At the company level: hiring fresh graduates is a guaranteed-profit deal

For a company, expanding the hiring of fresh graduates perfectly squeezes the living space of middle-aged people.

Extremely low labor cost: fresh graduates have no family mortgage, no elder-care or medical burden, and extremely high tolerance on salary — willing to accept a low base pay, high-intensity overtime, and short-term outsourced rotations. For the same role, a fresh graduate’s total comp is generally 30% to 50% below that of a 35-year-old.

Highly moldable, more obedient: students haven’t stepped in workplace pits, are easily influenced by visions and growth-story notions, don’t mind unpaid overtime, extra work, or mismatched authority and responsibility, and don’t calculate the price of labor or refuse excessive consumption the way a middle-aged job-seeker does — so management cost is lower.

Boosted by policy dividends: hiring fresh graduates earns subsidies, tax cuts, and talent-hukou quotas; some cities also offer premises and social-insurance subsidies. It’s equivalent to the state sharing part of the hiring cost with the company.

Manufacturing internal competition, pushing prices down both ways: continuous large-scale entry of young people forces incumbent middle-aged people internally to compromise on their own initiative, accept pay cuts, and take on more work; externally it creates a market illusion — labor supply is plentiful, companies never have to worry about hiring, and a middle-aged job-seeker’s bargaining power goes to absolute zero.

3. In this system the 35-year-old cohort is sacrificed by nature, and the contradiction is deftly deflected

The total number of positions hasn’t increased substantially in step, and corporate labor budgets are basically fixed. Hire more young people and you have to lay off or push out high-paid middle-aged people — which is exactly what everyone sees: “laying off veterans on one side while hiring frantically on campus on the other.”

The division of labor in public opinion is equally clear:

• To young people: promote the idea that being young and promising and willing to endure hardship is what brings a future, painting them an expectation of upward mobility;
• To middle-aged people: apply the labels “old fox, poor value, insufficient energy,” rationalizing layoffs and pay-cut discrimination.

The contradiction is successfully deflected: young people come to feel “the positions are all occupied by middle-aged people,” and middle-aged people come to feel “young people drag down the overall salary.” Workers inside turn against each other, and very few see clearly that the root is the company’s profit-seeking logic of pushing labor cost down without limit.

4. The most realistic conflict: the two groups’ survival floors are completely different

Most fresh graduates have family backing and can temporarily accept a meager monthly salary and overdrawn time, just for a line on the resume.

A 35-year-old carries multiple rigid expenditures — mortgage, elders’ medical care, children’s upbringing — and cannot accept a halved salary and overdrawing the body just to scrape by.

But market rules don’t distinguish between the two groups’ survival pressure; companies uniformly use the fresh-graduate salary standard to measure every job-seeker.

That produces today’s predicament: it isn’t that middle-aged people don’t work hard enough — the market’s employment system itself prioritizes young labor with no family burden, and the survival needs of middle-aged workers are not considered at all.

5. The core truth

Absorbing tens of millions of fresh graduates to stabilize youth employment is a macro necessity, but companies use that need to treat fresh graduates as a cheap replacement tool.

The original intent of “supporting young people” ends up becoming capital’s instrument for suppressing the value of middle-aged labor, using generational supply imbalance to complete continuous pay cuts and cage-swaps. The stigma of the age of 35 is just the accompanying script.

5. Income Can Fall, Debt Is Rigid

But the rigid debt that crushes ordinary people is “permanently rigid, only ever rising.”

A salary can shrink at the market’s whim; a mortgage can’t be a cent short or a moment late. The mortgage contract you signed after emptying six wallets and overdrawing thirty years of future income doesn’t get halved, deferred, or reduced because you lost your job, took a pay cut, or had a gap in income.

Banks are always guaranteed a return in rain or shine; financial capital always turns a guaranteed profit. When the economy booms, they eat their fill of the interest dividend; when the economy slumps, they bear no risk and make no concessions, and all the downward pressure, all the life risk, and all the economic cost is borne entirely by ordinary families carrying debt.

Once ordinary people can’t repay, what awaits us is overdue penalty interest, a stain on our credit record, our property auctioned off, half a lifetime of savings wiped out in an instant — and possibly the remaining debt still on our backs.

This is the most naked distribution injustice: capital’s returns are rigidly guaranteed, labor’s returns are dynamically zeroed out.

Capital holds bargaining power, rule-making power, and risk exemption. Ordinary people have only endless obligations and passively borne risk. A company can lay people off to protect itself, a bank can earn steady interest, but the ordinary person who works diligently and carries the load has no fallback, no buffer, no room for error whatsoever.

7. Every Problem Comes Down to Distribution in the End

A lot of people say the economy is slowing, jobs are hard, consumption is weak, livelihoods are difficult. In truth every economic problem and every livelihood hardship comes down, in the end, to distribution. It’s also the root of all latent financial crises.

The creation of social wealth depends on the day-and-night toil of tens of millions of ordinary workers, but the distribution of that wealth is extremely skewed and extremely unbalanced. The classic 80/20 rule is no longer enough to describe the current situation; the latest financial data has long confirmed the cruel reality: data from domestic top banks shows that only about 2% of high-net-worth individuals control over 87% of the market’s financial assets, while the remaining 98% of the general public has to divide up the meager remainder.

The real situation has never been an 80/20 split. It’s a tiny minority monopolizing the overwhelming majority of resources while the overwhelming majority absorbs all survival pressure and economic risk. The 20% hold property, equity, capital, connections, and premium resources; their wealth can compound and grow while they lie flat, and economic cycle fluctuations barely touch the base color of their lives. The remaining 80% of ordinary people can only, for a lifetime, rely on their single possession — labor — in exchange for meager income, with essentially zero risk tolerance.

8. The AI Era: Technological Inclusion or Capital Harvest?

What’s crueller is that after entering the AI era, this unjust distribution rule has been magnified without limit, and the so-called technological inclusion has finally become an outright lie.

Everyone is hyping AI’s cost reduction and efficiency gains, inclusion for all, empowerment of ordinary people. But the real distribution of the dividend has never had anything to do with bottom-tier workers. The enormous profits of the entire AI industry chain are almost wholly harvested by top tech giants and compute monopolies; a few founders, capital parties, and core technical people use it to achieve explosive wealth growth, monopolizing the vast majority of the incremental gains of the AI era.

AI looks usable by everyone, but in reality the dividend is highly oligopolized. The giants control top-tier compute, core data, and exclusive algorithms, taking more than 70% of the industry’s net profit and earning stable windfalls while lying down. Ordinary workers not only get no share of the AI dividend — they become the sacrifice that gets replaced and cost-cut. Companies use AI to compress labor positions heavily, streamline headcount, and push outsourcing further, replacing human labor with technology and compressing labor cost with algorithms. In the end all the saved cost and all the new profit flows to capital and the top companies, and never a cent to ordinary workers.

With past industry dividends, ordinary people could at least, through hard struggle, get a thin cup of the broth. Now the AI wave has arrived, wealth is concentrating at unprecedented speed, and ordinary people are about to be stripped even of the qualification to drink the broth.

The so-called AI inclusion has never been inclusion for workers or for ordinary people — it is inclusion only for capital and for the top giants. All the incremental wealth brought by technological progress once again flows in one direction to a minority, further ossifying the wealth gap and leaving a distribution system that was already unbalanced with no possibility whatsoever of a safety net or balance.

9. Ordinary People’s Clear-Eyed Resistance: Defend Your Cash Flow

The more ironic cycle is this: distributional injustice breeds extreme survival pressure, extreme pressure forces ordinary people to overdraw the future and take on debt, and the ossified rules continue to harvest ordinary people’s labor output.

We ordinary people work hard and create social wealth, yet can’t get a labor reward that matches it. We carry long-term mortgages and backstop economic development, yet have to bear the risk of unemployment and pay cuts alone. We’re swept along by consumerism, emptying our cash flow to maintain a life, and then have nowhere to retreat when income shrinks.

That’s also the core reason I’ve now completely given up all non-essential consumption.

I used to always feel that life would keep getting better, that effort gets rewarded, and that occasionally entertaining myself, spending, and treating myself was only right. But after living through six months of unemployment and the reality of a halved salary, I woke up completely: since society doesn’t need my productive capacity for now, and since capital harvests my labor income at will, then I will terminate the one-way transfer of wealth on my own initiative.

A cash-flow defense checklist for older job-seekers

Finding work at 35 is as hard as climbing to heaven. Since the value of your labor is severely depressed in the short term, the most rational thing isn’t to force consumption to maintain appearances — it’s to defend your cash flow down to nothing but the bottom line. This isn’t blaming heaven and other people; it’s an adult’s instinctive sense of responsibility toward their family.

The rigid essentials you must defend to the death (not one cent can be saved):

• Mortgage: the cost of defaulting is too high — protect it first;
• Utilities, gas, rice, flour, grain, oil: the basics for the household to function normally;
• Children’s basic tuition, basic medical insurance and medication: education and health can’t be interrupted;
• Commuting transport: needed for job-hunting, interviews, and basic getting around.

If cash flow is extremely tight, social insurance can be maintained temporarily at the lowest tier or through flexible-employment arrangements, but I’d advise against stopping contributions entirely — medical insurance and catastrophic-illness risk are still the family’s last line of defense.

Non-essential consumption you can cut off immediately:

• Online: short-video memberships, top-ups for music/video apps, online clothing and shoe shopping, digital accessories, snacks and milk tea, extra delivery meals, game top-ups;
• Offline: dinners out, movies, amusement, upgraded beauty and haircuts, new electronics, all kinds of interest classes (non-essential academic tutoring), self-drive trips;
• Idle-category: stockpiling, decorative ornaments, new phones and computers, luxury goods, surplus household items — don’t add a single one.

This list looks bitter, but in essence it’s trading active contraction for time and the right to choose. You don’t have to explain it to anyone, you don’t need consumption shame, and you certainly don’t need to feel shabby. A middle-aged person’s dignity isn’t maintaining a standard of living for others to see — it’s keeping the family from breaking apart, the debt from collapsing, and yourself from falling apart.

This isn’t blaming heaven and other people, and it isn’t passive giving-up. It’s the only self-rescue available to ordinary people under unbalanced distribution rules — the only defense where we can still hold the initiative.

Capital can push down the value of my labor at will, and the market can eliminate middle-aged workers at will, but I can defend my own cash flow, refuse to be harvested by consumerism, and refuse to pay for capital’s excess profit. Since there’s no fairness in the distribution of labor, then I’ll cut off the one-way outflow of wealth from the consumption end.

10. A Return to Realism in Views on Education: Family Assets Are the Real Safety Net

All the economic weakness, insufficient domestic demand, and livelihood anxiety have their root not in ordinary people being unwilling to work hard or afraid to spend, but in the structural imbalance of the distribution mechanism. When labor is no longer worth anything, debt is permanently rigid, risk is backstopped by everyone, and wealth is extremely concentrated, ordinary people not daring to spend, being unable to spend, and being unwilling to spend is the inevitable result.

And precisely because more and more people have personally suffered every bitterness and seen through this unjust set of game rules, everyone is starting to wake up collectively and exit on their own initiative, refusing to keep cooperating with meaningless involution and harvesting. The most visible change is that ordinary people’s views on education have completely returned to reality.

In the past, when a child failed an exam, parents would go all out to have them repeat the year, push for a prestigious school, and chase the education dividend, firmly believing that studying could overturn fate and that effort could leap social classes. But ordinary parents today have long seen the truth: under an extremely ossified distribution system, a degree stopped being ordinary people’s safety-net springboard long ago. Family assets are.

Countless children of ordinary families study bitterly for over a decade, smoothly get into undergraduate and master’s programs, and still — when they walk out of campus — can’t escape the fate of being laid off, having pay cut, and being over-extracted through outsourcing. Without capital to back you up, without resources to boost you, without connections to pave the way, no matter how high the degree, in the end it just means being harvested by the market and over-extracted by capital in a different way.

So more and more parents no longer obsess over repeating a year, no longer grind away at prestigious schools, no longer blindly overdraw the family’s finances to gamble on a child’s future, and no longer empty out their present life for an illusory class leap. People have stopped overdrawing the present to bet on a future that will be harvested, and instead pragmatically live the present well and defend the family’s underlying strength.

This isn’t lying flat and it isn’t resigning to fate. It’s ordinary people’s clearest-eyed resistance: since the incremental returns of effort always flow to capital and the top tier, and since ordinary people’s struggle only makes a wedding dress for an unjust distribution system, then we’ll exit the endless involution game on our own initiative, stop paying for capital’s profit, and stop consuming ourselves for illusory dividends.

11. Closing

At 35, I’ve finally understood the helplessness of adulthood: in this life of ours, we didn’t lose to laziness and we didn’t lose to luck. We lost to a distribution rule in which capital always profits, labor bears the pressure, risk sinks downward, and wealth and poverty ossify.

See the truth clearly, and don’t burn yourself up internally, don’t complain, don’t follow blindly. Before the rules change, defending your essentials, defending your cash flow, and defending your family’s bottom line — refusing all pointless harvesting — is the best way for an ordinary person to survive.