The software in my head was written by farmers
For generations my family farmed in the hills of southern Anhui. Then I left that village for Hangzhou and became a person who goes to an office.
As I understood it at the time, this was not a change of trade. It was making landfall. That is the whole story my parents’ generation told: study hard, pass your way out, get into a proper work-unit, put down roots, and then you are safe.
I believed it and I executed it. Fifteen years of wage work. Nearly six of them at one company, and for the first three years my name was on the outstanding-employee list. At thirty-five they cut me, with no warning of any kind. Looking afterwards, age filtered me out and my degree filtered me out, and the only thing that caught me is called outsourcing.
Every move I made followed the farmer’s rulebook: diligence, accumulation, loyalty, delayed gratification, the belief that input converts into reward. The market then priced me under an entirely different rulebook.
That other rulebook deserves a name. I am calling it nomadism.
Stability was always the glitch, not the default
We treat stability as the baseline and turbulence as the failure. Read the history and the order is inverted.
The two Han dynasties total just over four hundred years, and Wang Mang chopped them in half on the way. The Tang ran 289 years. The Ming, 276. The Qing, from entering the pass in 1644 to abdicating in 1912, 268. Those numbers look long, but a long dynasty is not the same thing as a quiet life. Inside those 289 Tang years, the Tang before the An Lushan Rebellion and the Tang after it are effectively two different regimes. The last twenty Ming years were a continuous collapse. Beneath the reign titles we translate as “golden age” there were still droughts, still famines, still memorials reporting children being sold.
Stitch together every stretch the histories label a “well-ordered reign” or a “flourishing age”, spread it across two thousand years, and it barely registers.
Lu Xun put it more precisely: Chinese history has turned over only two pages — one page is “wanting to be a slave and not being allowed to”, the other is “being a slave temporarily and securely”. The third era he asked the young to go and build has still not arrived.
Zhang Yanghao is even shorter: A dynasty rises — the people suffer. A dynasty falls — the people suffer.
Those lines are uncomfortable to read, but they are not despair. They are a different claim: the cycle is not the exception, the cycle is the default. The patch of “stability” we happened to stand on is the exception, and the exception has always been paid for by whoever had the least bargaining power.
So what reached me at thirty-five was not the world malfunctioning. It was closer to the world returning to its default settings, and I happened to be growing out of those settings.
Why the stable job was never mine to win
I will not prettify this: stable positions have always existed. The problem is that they are not allocated by effort.
Established posts are allocated by quota; quota is decided by one exam; that exam is decided by a dozen unglamorous things — whether anyone at home told you which major to pick, whether there was money to try again, whether there was a floor beneath you that let you take the bet. Inside firms, the long, cheap, trusted positions go to whoever arrived through a network and a background. Effort is at best the ticket stapled to that.
I spent more than a decade competing for something I assumed was scarce. Turns out that item was never on the shelf in my market.
That is where the promise “work hard and you will live well” goes wrong. Not because effort is useless, but because it disguises a distribution problem as a diligence problem. What you were never allocated gets re-explained as what you did not deserve. The cruelest part of that translation is this: it makes the people left outside the distribution spend their whole lives blaming themselves.
I am done blaming myself. This essay starts from there.
Farmer mind, nomad employment, settled debt
Compress the situation of people like me into one line: my mindset is agricultural, my employment is nomadic, and my debt is sedentary.
Those three mismatched things are the actual structure of the pain. One by one.
The farming logic says: I have a plot, I pay rent on it, and next year it grows grain anyway. A landlord might shave the rent in a bad year; the clan might step in. There really was a layer of long-term mutual dependence in that bargain, which is exactly why loyalty feels like a savings account — you deposit it and expect to withdraw some of it later.
The nomadic employment logic says: pastures run dry by season, so you move. Nobody owes me this pasture. Contracts for a year at a time, headcount revoked without notice, a client swapping vendors needs no reason, and the line in the report that I occupy is labelled cost, not asset. The commendation and the toast at the year-end dinner were real. But they were a current-period incentive, not a long-term contract. I mistook the first for the second, and that was the most expensive misreading of my life.
Then the third thing: the financial system asks me to behave like a farmer and sign a thirty-year agreement that forbids me from moving.
Mortgage, car loan, a child’s schooling, parents’ medical bills — every one of them assumes I still have a salary next year. So I sit at an outsourced desk with income that can be deleted at will, carrying a debt that only balances if I am never laid off. Here is the sharpest edge of the mismatch: it demands that my body stay put for thirty years while my work stays free to move at any moment.
I used to think I had failed at settling down. Now I see it differently: the employment structure no longer permits me to settle. Only the debt still holds the shape of settling.
Do not imagine you will retire at one company. Several I worked for are dead
The biggest error inside the word “stable” was assuming a company is a thing that simply continues.
Of the companies I have worked for, several are dead. Not downsized — gone as an entity.
Take NetEase. I left in 2020. Later I heard that the whole block of business I had been in was gone — not my team, the entire division. At the company where I spent nearly six years, the first line I joined was the key-account group, handling custom merchant requirements. That group has now been cut in its entirety. The custom business stopped existing, so of course the posts attached to it stopped existing.
Same mechanism in all three cases: a job does not hang off your badge. It hangs off a line of business. The line of business hangs off a market. And markets change.
What a farmer should really fear is not a harsh landlord. It is the soil turning to sand.
My wife’s family home is in Minqin, Gansu — genuinely on the edge of the desert. When the spring sandstorms come, noon looks like midnight, the sky goes yellow and you cannot see. What I have seen in recent years is more direct than the weather: the young people all left, the earthen houses stand empty year after year, and somebody has stamped them in blue — “long-term vacant”. When a piece of land dies, the first thing that happens is not that it stops producing. It is that nobody wants to live beside it any more. My parents’ generation taught me to put down roots at exactly the time their own villages were emptying out. They were not setting out to lie to me — desertification simply reached the layer where people live, and that part they did not foresee either.
And the reason a field turns to sand is often not inside that field. Minqin sits at the tail end of the Shiyang River basin: irrigate one more mu upstream, and the water table here falls further, and the lakes dry first. The hand that decides whether this land stays alive is upstream. Output is set by people who are not on site, and the one still standing there, working harder, arrives at exactly one conclusion: my own skill must have gone bad.
Once the land goes, diligence produces nothing. What made money in the last era does not necessarily make money in this one — that is not a motivational sentence about leaving your comfort zone, it is a statement about the physics of means of production. Pastures vanish, business lines vanish, divisions vanish, companies vanish, and none of that requires you to have performed badly.
So “stay at one company until you retire” was not a goal that loyalty could redeem. It was a bet requiring three things to hold at once: the company survives, the business survives, and that business still needs people. I control none of the three. I wagered fifteen years of loyalty on variables that move while I am not even in the room.
Where the money actually comes from: eating, dressing, housing, getting around
If you move, you need a direction. What I finally landed on is a plain, unfashionable judgement: after all the running around, the only durable source of money is human need — food, clothing, shelter, transport, and the extensions of those four.
You say you are doing frontier technology, putting people into space. Who is going to space every day? It is expensive and uncomfortable. The payer is a human being, not a concept. A person eats three hundred and sixty-five meals a year, sleeps somewhere, commutes, buys things for a child, gets ill. None of those counts go down because someone believed a story.
On the frontier-technology side, a great deal of the money does not come from need at all — it comes from narrative. A round of financing needs a new word; a market needs a new room to imagine in. Some of it does change the world. But it changes the world in this order: it burns a batch of people’s money and a batch of people’s jobs first, and the survivors benefit later. An ordinary wage worker is reliably in the first batch, not the second. Chasing that kind of wave means betting your salary on somebody else’s exit story.
Above “shelter” grows renovation, property management, rental services. Above “transport” grows aftermarket, repairs, charging. Above “food” grows prepared meals, delivery, and the kibble people buy for their cats and dogs. None of that is cool to talk about at dinner. But the businesses I have watched actually survive are all standing in that field. Pastures turn to sand. A human mouth does not.
One honest caveat, so this does not read like a business-opportunity seminar: the basic-need market is always populated and always crowded. Far more restaurants lose money than make it. So what this gives me is not advice to go open a noodle shop. It is a filter. Put two opportunities in front of me — one that lives by telling a new story, one that lives because somebody has to spend that money every single day — I take the second. The first one cuts staff for no reason, because it never earned anything anyway.
One hand tells you to spend. The other is automating you out
The most absurd thing about this era is that it wants you to open your wallet while it builds the thing that replaces you.
Bosses want AI automation: cut costs, raise efficiency, earn more with fewer people. Each firm’s arithmetic checks out on its own — labour is a cost, cut the cost and the margin improves. But profit does not come out of costs. Profit comes out of somebody being willing to pay. And the people willing to pay are the people being cut. The day a company treats its staff as pure cost, it has quietly decided its customers are pure cost too.
One industry shedding staff is called efficiency. Every industry shedding staff at once is called deleting the buyer.
Out loud the message is “stimulate consumption”. In practice the move is “cut my income”. Vouchers, trade-in subsidies, columns telling me to spend — at the same moment the post gets automated away and the outsourcing rate gets shaved another notch. That is not a coordination failure. That is one thing said and its opposite done, and the version everybody believes is the one being done. Nor should anyone claim they have not noticed the two contradicting each other: what they want is not “I have money”, it is “I spend the little I have”. Those are completely different requirements, and the paperwork only addresses the second. Demand is never suppressed by a lack of desire — it is suppressed by a lack of money. What comes out of that is not vanishing demand, it is demand stepping down: only eating, dressing, housing and getting around survive, everything else gets cut. Which is precisely why I put my bet on basic needs. Money retreats to the bottom floor and waits there.
I know the rebuttal. Every previous technological revolution made more jobs than it destroyed, and over a long enough horizon I will probably concede it. But I am counting the twenty years I have left, not the next two centuries of human history. Keynes’s line — “in the long run we are all dead” — was aimed exactly at what that kind of consolation costs, and at who pays. A man who cares only about this quarter’s margin, and does not know that the margin comes from human need, tightens that chain until it snaps. And whoever is standing at the loose end of the chain is the one it hits.
Nobody is going to untie this contradiction for me, so I am only looking for my position inside it. One side lives by telling a new story; the other lives because people still have to be alive. I will stand on the second. And I have to remember that I am myself part of the suppressed demand — which makes every yuan I spend the only vote I still get to cast. I am casting mine at things I will still need tomorrow, not at things that need me to look like I am doing well.
So what do you do: follow the money. That is not degradation, it is strategy
I am not going to tell anyone to “leave their comfort zone”. There is nothing inside the comfort zone, and stepping out still costs a beating. Here is only what survived my arithmetic.
One: take the place-name out of your identity. My move from a village in southern Anhui to Hangzhou was, in my mother’s telling, “going up”, and its default setting was: now you are nailed here. But if the work flows, then “I hold a respectable job in Hangzhou” is self-worth parked on a variable I do not control. A city is somewhere I have been, not someone I am. If one day I need to take better-paid work in another city that sounds less respectable, that is not failure. That is moving the herd.
Two: stop developing feelings for a company. Sentiment is a settled-civilisation savings instrument; inside a fluid structure it is a liability. I can be genuine with colleagues and remember whoever helped me. But I owe a corporate entity no expectation of “we”. That word exists between the year-end gala and the email sent two hours before the layoff notice. Belonging goes to my family, to my craft, to the things that can physically travel with me.
Three: carry-able things are assets; what cannot be carried is grass. Permissions inside your company account, the internal systems, the title somebody handed you, the contacts who only recognise your badge — all grass. Green on your plot this year, gone next. What you can carry is no more than three things: your body, your skill, and how many people would speak the truth on your behalf. I now allocate effort against those three and downgrade everything else to short-term rent.
Four: save, and put the money somewhere that does not require you to be present. Cash flow is the herd’s stamina — how many months you can absorb decides what you dare refuse and when you are forced to accept. A person with no savings has no ability to migrate; they can only wait to be notified.
The money should not sit in a current account waiting to be diluted, either. My practice is to dollar-cost average into index funds: a Nasdaq-tracking one and a CSI 300 one, a little of each. I do not buy them because they must go up. I buy them because they do not require me to know any of the companies inside. I can understand one firm, I can run one business line for ten years, but I cannot control whether either still exists. An index does not bet that “every constituent survives”. It bets on the fact that it replaces them — one delisted, one promoted in, whoever is earning gets in. It is the only pasture I have found that sits inside nobody’s org chart: it needs no attendance from me and no department head can delete it. DCA removes a little of the rule that you must keep showing up to earn. It is not a path to riches. It is a defensive path, and it can still lose money — I will not pretend otherwise.
Five: the house, the car, and anything capital has hyped — delay it if you can delay it. A fixed monthly obligation is a lock on your future liquidity. I used to think a purchase of a home was called putting down roots. It now looks like mortgaging thirty years of migration ability in one transaction, in exchange for a plot that had already started falling in value. My parents’ generation completed their accumulation by buying. My generation bought and converted savings into a down payment that evaporated. A new car loses a chunk of its price driving out of the lot — a pure liquidity black hole. As for the hyped things, collectibles, limited editions, the device everyone is told they must own: their premium is you paying for somebody else’s exit.
I already bought, so I have no standing to say “do not buy”. I am only reporting the price structure I can see now: every expense that was cleared by face or by roots is one more obligation that makes moving impossible.
Six: never run on a single income. I did that arithmetic in the previous essay and will not redo it. One line in nomad vocabulary: a herder who bets the family on one pasture is not greedy — grassland physics simply does not permit it.
I am not selling nomadism as freedom
Nomadism has no foundations. That is its real cost.
A child’s school needs foundations. Parents’ medical cover needs foundations. Growing old needs foundations. Even “where will I be working next month” needs a verifiable history to stand on. I know all of this. I am not one of those people saying “digital nomad life is wonderful” — most of them are people with capital describing their own lifestyle back to you.
What I want to say instead is smaller: when other people have already stopped giving you foundations, treating “I have lost my foundation” as a personal failure is the single most useless expense available to you. It keeps you blaming yourself, and self-blame produces no cash flow.
Stability is not something I stopped wanting. It is simply no longer available by picking the right company. Its price today is cash, skill, more than one income, and a body that has not been ground down — and I will probably be paying that instalment for the rest of my working life.
The first thing I tell my child will not be what my mother told me
My mother’s generation taught one move: get in. Get into the better school, the better work-unit, the better city, and the rest takes care of itself.
What I will tell mine is one step: never treat any payslip as a long-term contract. Effort is worth it, and effort creates no obligation on anyone else. And the thing fifteen years of wage work taught me the hard way: the cycle is the default and stability is the accident. When the accident arrives, remember it was not your virtue; when it leaves, do not accept it as your fault.
This is not an encouraging story. But it was computed off a real set of accounts, not read out from a year-end script.
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