I don't know if everyone is like me, brushing nostalgia to short** late at night, and there will always be some **old objects from the decade that trigger the switch of memory. Painted wooden cabinets, sunken leather sofas, bulky old TVs, and "28 bar" bicycle ...... all over the streetsTogether, they outline an era of material barrenness, but a strong sense of happiness.
Nowadays, material life is becoming more and more affluent, but people always seem to feel burdened by external things. The speed of item replacement is extremely fast, a dazzling array of items are stuffed into our lives, the popularity of logistics makes distant items become accessible, but the cool feeling of consumption is limited to the moment of ordering, people begin to worry about how to store more items with limited space, and the concept of "breaking away" is popular.
How to return to the harmonious relationship between people and things has become a topic worth considering.
Wang Xiaowei, a young scholar, is an associate professor at the School of Philosophy at Chinese Minmin University. As a teacher of philosophy of science and technology, researching and thinking about the relationship between people and things is his professional topic. In his new book "The Depths of Everyday Life", he uses his own experience as the basis to depict a collective history that generations of Chinese have walked together, and tries to answer his inner and perhaps many people's inner doubts from the perspective of science and technology philosophy
Why do bikes seem to carry a family's emotions more than cars? Why is a wood stove more fragrant than a gas stove for cooking? Why is it that objects that used to be so expensive, as if they were a member of a family, are now pure commodities, with only shriveled use value remaining?
Wang Xiaowei. Wang Xiaowei said that the past life has its own unique texture, although we can't really go back to the past, but the inspiration from the past life can help us live better in the present.
The following is based on Wang Xiaowei's narration and the content of the manuscript.
Why we miss what we lived 20 years ago
Some time ago, I went back to my hometown.
Before leaving, I walked around the old house, taking pictures everywhere in the room with my mobile phone, hoping to record everything in the room and leave it for a sneaky look at at night.
In one corner, I found a washstand made of wood. It was a dowry given by my mother's maiden family when my parents got married, and I moved with us several times, but now it is very old, and one of the wooden legs is badly corroded, and the color has faded from the original bright red to tan.
I wanted to renovate it and bring it back to my current home. Even though it may be out of place with the modern décor, it's like a hallway to a bygone time, and every time I see it, it triggers memories of the past.
In the past two years, I have found that I and many people around me have begun to brush up on nostalgia and short**, showing deep feelings for the old objects of the 10s.
On the one hand, it may be that when people reach middle age, their eye sockets become shallow, and their hearts are more fragile; On the other hand, there is something to be remembered about that era, although the material is not so abundant, but the connection between people is very thick. Of course, we can't really go back in time, and no one agrees to go back. But why do we want to go back in time? I think that's a question worth pondering.
The clothing, food, housing and transportation of the Chinese have undergone earth-shaking changes in the past three decades. Take the house as an example, in my impression, when the post-80s were young, the house has not become a topic, because it is usually guaranteed as a necessity, as long as the unit is OK, the working experience is long enough, and the family population is large enough, there is always a place to live, and it is very common for a family to be crammed into a tube building of more than ten square meters.
Since about 1998, in order to alleviate the housing shortage, China has carried out vigorous real estate reforms, gradually ending the housing allocation system and realizing the commercialization and socialization of housing. According to the China Statistical Yearbook, in 1978, China's per capita housing area in urban and rural areas was 67 and 81 square meter, and by 2019, that number had become 398 and 489 square meters.
The house as a whole is spacious, but it also has one more attribute, which is "assets". Many people buy a house not to live in, but to make a fortune through the house, and the house as an asset is mainly for liquidation, so it is also highly liquid.
Many asset allocation experts will tell you that a house will be lived in for a maximum of 15 years, after which it will have little value; The old house does not approve the loan, the liquidity is poor, if it is not a school district house, it should be sold as soon as possible. From the perspective of asset preservation and appreciation, this view is actually quite pertinent, but when you think about it, you can't help but shudder.
What is home? Home is an anchor that needs to be nailed in one place, and after several generations of people have lived in it, the house has come out like a walnut and is beginning to glow. However, it is difficult for people who see the house as an asset first and foremost, and they see themselves as a passer-by when it comes to decoration, the placement of personal belongings, and even the overall emotional investment.
When I was a child, I lived in a building divided by my parents' unit, and although it was crowded, my living condition was much better than it is now. At that time, every family was familiar with it, and the interpersonal communication was very rich. In the early silo building, the kitchen was on the balcony, each household cooked, every family smelled the fragrance, what each family ate, and how to eat were all public. The heads of each family often exchange cooking skills together, and children often eat 100 family meals. That warm, strong sense of community is the best flavor enhancer for meals.
Photo source TV series "Golden Wedding" is now because the pace of work and life is getting faster and faster, and there are fewer people who actually cook. If there are no elderly people at home, the couple can order takeout for a year. Younger couples prefer to eat at the mall.
Albert Bergman, an American philosopher of technology, argues that the traditional family dinner has important existential significance. He refers to family dinners as focal things, and the difference between focal things and consumer things is that the former generates a sense of meaning through hard work and physical input, while the latter is a buying and selling relationship, which creates a great spiritual emptiness.
Photo source TV series "I Love My Home" Grocery shopping, choosing vegetables, cooking, and even brushing pots and washing dishes are all important activities to create and fill a sense of life. Only when someone buys vegetables can someone choose a dish, and only when someone chooses a dish can someone cook, and the division of labor between the two can feel that the other party is indispensable. It is easy for two people who order takeout every day to break up.
I often feel that the opposite of anxiety and depression is the everyday. The reason why modern people feel pain so often is because they have lost their daily routines, and their lives are only left with a bunch of deadlines and KPIs, and there is a lack of vivid details. We are used to saying that we don't have time to cook, bask in the sun, raise fish and flowers, but in fact, as long as you feel that your daily life is important, you have time.
How electronics have changed our lives
I teach philosophy of science and technology at Chinese People's University.
Philosophy of science and technology is a secondary discipline of philosophy, and its main research direction is divided into two parts: one is the philosophy of science, which discusses what science is, why science is the truth, the law of scientific development, and so on; The other is the philosophy of technology, which studies the impact of technology on society and analyzes how technology has changed our daily lives.
Most people may think that mobile phones, glasses, cars and other items are just neutral tools for us to use and fiddle with. It's not necessarily that simple. Technological artifacts (colloquially known as "things") can subtly change your perception, your way of life, and your perception of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in electronics.
I'll use television as an example. When the post-80s generation was young, many people already had TVs at home. Frankly, television accompanies our generation far more than our parents. As a child, I was often left alone at home, with the door locked from the outside, and the television gave me a lot of comfort while I waited for my parents to leave work.
In those days, television was not just a simple appliance, it also represented an identity, a symbol of beauty and modern life. In many people's homes, TV is placed on the table of the Eight Immortals, and the four gods of Fulu and Suxi are put together, and TV has become the "God of Science and Technology".
In the past, there was usually only one TV in a family, and it was not uncommon for the whole family to watch TV together and grab the remote control, and watching TV became a family activity that brought the whole family together. And now, there is a TV in every room at home, and even everyone has one in their hands - the terminals of network TV are proliferated in large numbers, and mobile phones, computers, and ipads can all become TVs. The scene of a family sitting together watching TV may be limited to watching the Spring Festival Gala every year.
When all the electronics are trying to squeeze people's attention, many people become overly dependent on them.
I once tried to quit my phone because I felt that swiping my phone was taking up too much of my time. In the end, of course, it failed. In the early days, the mobile phone was just a communication tool, but now, the mobile phone has become a kind of parallel world production machine. Much of the content of daily life has been digitized, and mobile phones have even become ID cards, which are displayed to people at every turn, and have become inescapable.
The development of mobile phone technology has indeed allowed us to gain a certain degree of convenience. But the danger is that the logic of mobile phones can lead us to think that virtual reality is more real than physical reality — while you can use your phone to order takeout, buy groceries, and see the scenery, cooking, going to the supermarket, and hiking can be seen as a nuisance that needs to be discarded. Labor and hard work are precisely important components of daily life, and long-term immersion in virtual reality will make people's imagination and feelings of real life more and more impoverished.
Another reason why I want to escape from my phone is that I always feel that I am dominated by some kind of particularly strong consumption logic when I surf the Internet every day.
I like to play chess, I used to go online to watch others share chess-related skills, it is really pure sharing, everyone builds a small community, and they are talking about the joy of playing chess. Now that I am brushing Xiaohongshu, some people were still talking about playing chess yesterday, and they started to bring goods today. The end of the universe has become a carrying, and the fundamental purpose of short**, live broadcasts, and TV shows is to sell goods, and our lives are shrouded in advertisements everywhere.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said that the individual is free as a consumer, but not free only as a consumer. In the consumer society, all people's desires are economicalized, and everyone's life is constantly looking for new goods, and liking the new and hating the old has become a virtue. We will become people who only know how to consume, and people will become tools of the consumer society, which is a terrible thing.
How you receive things will do to others
I remember when I was a child, every time something was added to the house, the whole family was in high spirits. In the past, objects were so precious that they were like a member of a family.
And now, there are things everywhere, ready to be obtained, and advertisers are constantly creating false demand, which makes people's attitudes towards things change a lot. People are no longer willing to invest strong emotions in objects, and things gradually degenerate into a simple commodity in the process, leaving only a shriveled use value, and people always feel burdened by external objects, and the concept of "disconnection" has become popular.
The way we treat "things" is very different from that of our parents' generation. The elderly love to hoard things, and every corner of the house is full of old objects, bottles and cans, and plastic bags that are reluctant to throw away after shopping. I was unhappy with this kind of hoarding because it would make the already small house more crowded and messy.
Later, I saw an exhibition called "Making the Most of Things", in which the artist Song Dong exhibited all kinds of objects that his mother had collected all her life, and the room full of objects showed the life of an ordinary person, and that picture touched me deeply. I suddenly felt that a person's life is made up of these trivial, complex and inconsequential details, and all the traces of life are in these objects.
Song Dong's "Making the Best of Things" exhibition shows that the older generation especially cherishes things. In their hearts, the things they use now must be kept, and the old things cannot be lost. On the one hand, it is because the old things are attached to their hard work and important life memories, and on the other hand, it is also because they see themselves as people with a future, as the old man often says, "Don't throw these things away, they can still be used in the future".
As a middle-aged person, especially after having children, you will understand that "breaking away" cannot sustain family life. Three generations live together, and the house is bound to continue to grow bottles, cans, cans and plastic bags. You can fight at first, and after a while, you will feel very powerless, because it is a real life scene, and life is varied, chaotic, and not so neat, and you can only accept it.
Since accepting the bottles and cans from the family, my relationship with my parents has also improved a lot. Sometimes I think that every time, my mother takes out a hidden plastic bag to buy vegetables, for her, maybe it is a spiritual activity, just like she and her father take the bus for two hours every day, just to buy cheap food for two cents, it is a life experience they cherish, there is no need to criticize and block, they feel happy, isn't that okay?
Chinese often say that they treat people and things, and the attitude of receiving things largely reflects the attitude of treating people. If a person has a rough attitude towards objects, comes and goes as soon as they are called, it is difficult to see things and thoughts, and never retains any memories of the past, this person may become a cold person, and the spiritual world will be very barren.
So I suggest that people re-examine objects as a way to live, not just a thing. You must learn to feel things, cherish things, value the intervention of things in your life, and accept the guidance of things. For example, you can put a few old pieces of furniture with common memories at home, consciously keep important ticket stubs, pay attention to the inspiration given by the objects when you go out to play, and be able to see how time has left traces on a stone.
As for the development of modern technology, I think we should maintain a cautious attitude, at least not embrace modern technology without reservation, and think that technological progress is all positive, without any review of it.
The technology of the future will present the world with an ideal life that is close in front of us and can never be reached, but true happiness belongs to every moment within reach. Fortunately, for Chinese, if they want to return to the harmonious relationship between people and things, they only need to turn back thirty or forty years to get a lot of inspiration.