There is a group of middle-aged people who have lost their jobs due to various reasons. They are old and young, so they have to pretend that they are still working. However, the pressure of life is like a mountain, weighing heavily on these middle-aged people. .

Dear readers, how are you doing during the current epidemic? There is a group of middle-aged people who have lost their jobs due to various reasons. They are old and young, so they have to pretend that they are still working. However, the pressure of life is like a mountain, weighing heavily on these middle-aged people. .

Xiaofei would like to remind readers who are not part of the system to always maintain a sense of urgency.

Let’s first take a look at the current situation of a middle-aged unemployed woman from Beijing drifting under the epidemic and double reduction.

Waking up early in the morning, Yao Menghan washed up and went out to "go to work" as usual.

She first went to the nearby self-study room , bought a "One-day Study Card" in a group, and stayed there until her second child's kindergarten was over. At noon, she ordered a takeout of stir-fried noodles and sat in the self-study room. Finished eating at the table outside. On the recruitment software, the resume she submitted always showed "read" but there was no response. In fact, there are not many companies in Beijing that are still recruiting for positions that she is qualified for - 38 years old, female, married with two children, all her work experience is in the education and training industry, which makes her qualified There are very few jobs available.

Yao Menghan felt that he was a typical portrait of the unemployed.

Before this, she worked in preschool education at a large Internet education company. Earlier, her parents had given her several million from the sale of real estate to invest, but the friend who introduced her to the investment project kept refusing to pay back the money. After calling the police, I discovered that the so-called friend had been working hard to create a self-made persona in the circle of friends, and had achieved a class jump through fraud along the way.

After Yao Menghan lost his job, his husband was the only breadwinner of the family. Text messages and call notifications calling for payment of mortgage and credit card debts rang frequently. Whenever Yao Menghan heard the phone ringing, her heartbeat would speed up and her hands and feet would become cold. Unbearable, she put her phone on silent mode forever, but the bills still kept coming. She told her husband the news of her unemployment and told him to hide the news from her parents-in-law. Since she, her parents-in-law, and their two children were crowded into a 60-square-meter old hut, there were almost no secrets between them. Once she appears at home during the day on a weekday, she can read the unconcealable fear on the old man's face: It is already too difficult to maintain the current life. If a person loses his job, how can he continue to live?

There are many more pressures that Yao Menghan cannot bear: For example, her mother-in-law is in poor health and needs surgery; her parents were defrauded of the money for selling their house and now rent a house; her eldest son has to go to school, and her second son is not ranked in the kindergarten; and the mortgage payment cannot be paid. Otherwise, the millions will never come back, and the scammers are still at large. I believe it would be difficult for any one person to sustain all kinds of pressure.

Yao Menghan said that many times, he stood on the overpass, watching the traffic under the bridge, and imagined what it would be like to jump off. This thought would come to her mind from time to time.

She said that the suicide note had been written a long time ago and was tucked into the notebook where she drew simple drawings every day. She felt that her family would have found it easily when they helped her pack away her belongings. This long last letter is full of guilt for his parents, regret for his marriage, and reluctance for his two children. What I write about most is my doubts and denials about myself.

Simple drawings drawn by Yao Menghan

It's time to jump, she said to herself. Once in the air, you can watch the children from the sky. Thinking of this, she decided to take one last look at the smiles of the two children on the screen saver of her phone.

Telepathically, her husband sent a WeChat message at this time: " Do you believe in the afterlife? Our life will definitely get better, endure, that's everything! " Seeing her husband's words, Yao Menghan squatted on the ground Howling. She didn't know how long she cried, but she suddenly felt that it was "too bad" for her to die now. "I should have watched the liar spit out the money and go to jail."

From her experience, we can see that, In fact, her own conditions are not bad. If it were placed on an ordinary person, even if she does not have a job, she can live a very comfortable and happy life as a full-time wife and a shopkeeper.But she just puts too many demands on herself, as if she has to support the entire family by herself. In the end, it just adds a lot of pressure and dissatisfaction with herself.

I don’t know if you have watched the online drama "I am fine in a foreign country". Yao Menghan's experience is surprisingly similar to that of Hu Jingjing in the play, but Hu Jingjing is not so lucky. Hu Jingjing is also a girl from Beijing. She is usually carefree. No one around her thought that she would jump to end herself on her birthday. A young and wonderful life. Before her death, Hu Jingjing was constantly threatened and intimidated by phone calls from debt collection companies, and then she suffered ruthless job layoffs. This made him instantly feel that his life had lost all hope and support. So I chose to end this painful life on my 25th birthday.

I think that if someone could feel her pain and give her appropriate encouragement and care, maybe the tragedy would not have happened. So I say that Yao Menghan is very lucky. She has a husband who supports her unconditionally. If her husband hadn't said: " Do you believe in the afterlife? Our life will definitely get better, and enduring is everything! "It may be difficult for her to support such a passage.

Unemployment

"I am just a useless person." Speaking of unemployment, Yao Menghan described himself this way.

Her long hair was tied loosely into a ponytail, hanging slumped behind her head. A clear hairline and sparse and mottled gaps could be seen on the top of her head. She said that some time ago, she lost her hair due to excessive anxiety, and her whole body became visibly "Xuan" - this is a word used by northerners to describe the rapid expansion of steamed buns during the steaming process, and she felt that it was used to describe her own reasons. Excessive puffiness caused by emotions is just right.

She speaks very fast and can't help crying when describing her experiences, but she is also keenly aware of the mosquitoes scurrying around her. The moment she quickly swatted the mosquito to death, you can seem to feel the scene of her driving away the mosquito after the child was asleep. You can see her stern scolding when the child tried to touch the home switch , and her call to the district education committee. I was furious when I complained that my middle child was not eligible to go to a public kindergarten.

Before he lost his job, Yao Menghan was a teacher in a "kindergarten-to-school transition" institution. In order to prevent their children from studying too hard after entering elementary school, many parents will choose to send their children to such institutions in the last year of public kindergarten for academic training and thinking development.

"This model goes against children's nature." Yao Menghan said that in the educational institution where she works, these four- and five-year-old children have to study non-stop from 8:20 to 16:30 every working day, and only after lunch There is ten minutes of walking time.

At the beginning of 2020, due to the epidemic, the training turned online, and it took a few months to return to normal offline courses. But not long after, the "double reduction" began. Although it was mainly targeted at subject education at the K12 stage, subject tutoring for preschoolers was also affected. Until the end of March 2021, the Ministry of Education issued the "Guidance on Vigorously Promoting the Scientific Connection between Kindergartens and Primary Schools", which completely uprooted this industry.

"No matter how cautious the company is, it cannot withstand many parents calling the Education Bureau to complain." Yao Menghan said, "For example, if some children cannot learn the Rubik's Cube in class, the teacher may say that if they really can't do it, Forget it, you don’t have to learn how to twist a Rubik’s Cube, but the parent will think, why can’t my child not do it if other children can do it? So he complains to the Education Bureau. Anyway, he thinks that his child is not allowed to do it. If you learn it, other children can't learn it, so you should put this aside. "

" is crazy, completely crazy. "In Yao Menghan's view, the parents' collective " chicken baby " is the root cause of her collapse after losing her job. ——When she thought about her children going to school, and in six years they would be promoted from primary school to junior high school, and in nine years they might be diverted to learn to be chefs in the "general occupation diversion", she couldn't help but sigh and shed tears alone, "I can hold my own. , but I can’t protect my child.”

So she needs money and needs a job.When she resigned, Yao Menghan and her colleagues did not receive compensation, and she did not choose arbitration because she was worried about being blacklisted by HR circles in the education field in Beijing.

As an only child in the early 1980s, her parents always taught Yao Menghan to study hard and be self-reliant. In college, she attended a 985 university in the south, and later returned to Beijing to study for a master's degree from a better school. She knew her parents would be very disappointed if they found out she was unemployed. She would also begin to question her own value. After she lost her job, she kept asking her husband, "What do you think the value of my existence is? I have made no contribution to this family."

"He said that I was his spiritual support." said At this point, a smile appeared on Yao Menghan's face, "But the term ' spiritual pillar ' is too vague and will collapse at any time. I can just remove this pillar and replace it with another one. What's more, money is needed to live a better life." I have read a survey that said it is necessary to exchange the life of one of my parents for 30 million. Do you want to exchange it? Many people choose to exchange it. If I can exchange my life for a fortune that is enough for my two children to grow up, I will. She is willing; without moral kidnapping, I think the child should also be willing.”

Pretending to go to work

At first, she planned to find a job immediately and seamlessly. But when I checked the recruitment software, I found that less than 30% of the positions were reserved for workers over 35 years old. As a mother of two children, she cannot go on business trips or work overtime for long periods of time. She cannot go too far from home because she has to take her children to and from school. "So why should they want me?"

She has a high school classmate who works in a fitness and beauty salon. The company manager, who is middle-aged, went to work as HR in a reliable state-owned enterprise. Her classmates clearly told her that even state-owned enterprises would not want women over 35 years old: those who are unmarried and have no children are likely to get married immediately after joining the job to prepare for pregnancy and take maternity leave; those who are married and have children, those who have one child are worried about having a second child; Those who are pregnant will face extremely complicated parenting chores. Especially now, when children take online classes at home and need full-time care, most families sacrifice their mother’s work.

Yao Menghan is considering starting a business again, doing self-media in the parenting category, and selling preschool children’s education experience that he has accumulated for more than ten years. But she only knows how to produce content, not how to market and promote it. Although she watches the mother and baby special show in the live broadcast room every night, she can't figure out how a qualified anchor can stand out. The road to entrepreneurship is still in the fantasy stage.

The situation at home did not allow her to lose her job - after learning that her life savings had been defrauded, her father went to the hospital twice because of high blood pressure , but because he did not want to cause her psychological burden, he kept it secret from her. She later I learned it from my mother. Therefore, she did not dare to reveal the news of unemployment to her parents. Her father-in-law and mother-in-law were also defrauded of hundreds of thousands, but after all, they were just one floor away and they never asked her about it. Several times, Yao Menghan felt that her mother-in-law was about to speak. At that moment, she quickly turned around and entered the kitchen or bathroom. Her mother-in-law's words seemed to be blocked by her back, and the house was filled with suffocating silence.

So, she decided to escape this depression by pretending to go to work as usual.

"Thank you for the epidemic." Yao Menghan said. Due to the recent epidemic control in Beijing, many companies are working from home, so she does not have to go out every day to pretend to go to work and eat salty fried noodles for lunch like she did last year. She can stay upright and not go out, but because her parents-in-law are at home, she still has to close the door from time to time and pretend to be working online. "They may have assumed that I was working with the door closed, so I just let them speculate without explaining."

She also imagined the state of people at work: "You have to pay attention to current affairs, think about problems, and be energetic. God, and as a front-line teacher, you have to have contact and interaction with the children." So, at the dinner table every day, she would pretend to be a "working person" and talk about some company anecdotes and teaching experiences to let her parents-in-law. I feel like she is really working.

When she closes the door, she sometimes picks up a carbon pen and draws a simple sketch quietly.After giving birth to two children, Yao Menghan hardly spent any time alone. She would also often contact her friends to relieve some of her anxieties, or to ask others to give her some opinions and suggestions on her difficult situation. She found that many of her peers, including those born in the 1990s who she had met in the workplace, were also unemployed. A middle-aged friend of hers used to run an education and training institution. After losing his job due to "double reduction", he could only lie down at home. His mother, who helped him look after the children at home, vaguely knew about it, but she would wake him up every morning by making a "clanging" noise in the kitchen, forcing him to go out and pretend to go to work. What do everyone rely on to support themselves now? Are they all acting and working like me?

It is true that there are many unemployed people working in performances.

Fan Peng, who lives in Nanjing, originally worked for a pharmaceutical reagent company. The reagents produced by the company were mainly sold to major universities, scientific research institutions or to the United States. After the epidemic, colleges and universities suspended classes and logistics operations were suspended. The company was overwhelmed and laid off almost all its employees.

After losing his job, Fan Peng, who lived with his parents, began to pretend to go to work - every day, he would go out after breakfast and go to the same KFC to sit there all day, because KFC was a safe place where his parents would never go. After staying for a long time, he will use his mobile phone number to register a "King Card" to help KFC employees complete their monthly quotas. The reward is the hot Kodak Duck, which can be sold on Xianyu for nearly 40 yuan. . He would also use a floating stopwatch to grab Moutai and foreign wine, and then resell them to earn living expenses.

Make ends meet

But the money is honest, and it will not automatically arrive every month because of a lie that is so sophisticated that no one can see through it. Poverty cannot be concealed, and Yao Menghan will always be reminded of the constraints of life at some point.

The monthly living expenses of a family of four in Beijing, including housing and car loans, are close to 20,000 yuan, and they all rely on the husband's income alone. Yao Menghan's husband is engaged in the exhibition business industry. After the epidemic, various film festivals, music festivals, conferences, etc. were frequently canceled, and her husband's income also dropped by at least 30%. Because he was unable to pay some commercial insurance, Yao Menghan chose to surrender his insurance. However, according to the contract signed at that time, only a small part of the money could be refunded if the policy was surrendered midway, and most of the fees paid before were wasted.

After all the money for the surrender was spent, she lived a life of overdrafting her credit card limit. Gradually, Yao Menghan began to receive calls from debt collection agencies. Some will use a threatening tone to ask her where she lives, and send her a bill or an indictment. Others threaten her that her bank credit report is broken and her children will not be able to go to school.

When Yao Menghan hears the ringtone of her mobile phone, her heart beats faster and her whole body trembles. She sets her mobile phone to silent, but still carefully checks online "whether problems with parents' credit report will affect their children's schooling." To this end, she also specifically consulted friends who are lawyers. That friend told her that at least the compulsory education stage would not be affected at all.

But debt collection calls sometimes come to her parents, who have been workers all their lives and ask her in horror what is going on. She had no choice but to continue making it up, "It's all telecommunications fraud. Just don't answer the numbers when you see them from out of town."

One of Yao Menghan's concerns is whether it will affect her children's schooling; but her bigger concern is that if any family member has a physical problem, she will not have the savings and cash flow to support the cost of treatment. Not long after she lost her job, her mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital because of a heart problem. The hospital recommended that they perform surgery immediately. The initial cost of the surgery was 70,000 yuan, which needed to be paid into the hospital's designated card immediately. She and her husband knew very well that their family did not have 70,000 yuan. They consulted another expert through a friend, who recommended conservative treatment without surgery. She sincerely wanted to believe that this expert's opinion was more authoritative. They allowed their mother-in-law to be discharged from the hospital and returned home, but her mother-in-law was no longer able to help them take care of their children and lived alone in a small and cramped bungalow in the Second Ring Road.

What made Yao Menghan the most sad was that when she was discharged from the hospital, her mother-in-law said to her apologetically that she had delayed your work.

But no matter how hard it was, Yao Menghan did not stop the extracurricular tutoring classes for his children that cost tens of thousands of yuan a semester.

Although " double minus " is very popular, it only makes the extracurricular tutoring conducted in the public underground. Yao Menghan, who has been deeply involved in the field of education and training for many years, knows that many parents she knows hire one-on-one tutors for the nine subjects of "Language, Mathematics, Foreign Affairs, Politics, History, Geography, Physics, and Chemistry" when their children first enter the first grade. Tutoring fees are around a thousand yuan. Yao Menghan also used personal connections to help her eldest son take the most cost-effective online courses in language and mathematics. He also had to purchase supporting teaching materials, APP memberships, etc. "Two or thirty thousand a semester can't afford it."

" Beijing's is too serious to be rolled into . Children from ordinary families like ours don't have much choice but to follow the roll, otherwise they may not even be able to eat when they grow up. " In Yao Menghan's view, Two children are like two lives at the bottom of a well. It takes a lot of money to fish them out and see a more open and rich world. A wealthy family may be able to easily fish their children out of the well, but a family like hers may have to struggle throughout their lives to expand the size of the wellhead so that the child standing at the bottom of the well can see as much of the sky as possible. Maybe bigger. Yao Menghan said that every year, "political security students" and "tiaozi students" in each district may account for one-third or more of the admission quota of prestigious middle schools; and if they want to be among the top schools in Haidian during the "primary school to junior high school" stage, many parents will ask The child signed up for a "really awesome competition." For those competitions, the registration fee alone costs tens of thousands of yuan.

Yao Menghan can feel that his children are frustrated in academic competition. When her eldest son was in the middle class of kindergarten, he suddenly told her on the way home that he wanted to sign up for a math class because a child in the class was already in fourth grade, and she could only add and subtract. Law. The child showed him several mixed calculation questions of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. He couldn't even understand the symbols of the equations. "He felt like he was killed in an instant. It was the humiliating feeling of having his dignity rubbed on the ground by a classmate."

" The real world

Yao Menghan reflected that the reason why he was deceived and unemployed was because his past life was too smooth and he thought of human nature and society too simply, but competition is cruel and ruthless. "So I want the children to know that society is very unfair - there may be many people who don't know how to stand on the same starting line as you, and once you are eliminated, you will have no way out. If you don't tell them this, It is very likely that when they grow up, they will be like me and face the collapse of their worldview, which is very painful.”

Therefore, Yao Menghan began to focus on cultivating children’s sense of competition, “In the past, I would tell them, just be yourself. Don't worry about others. But now I will tell them, no matter what you are doing, you have to look at what others are doing and whether you have been left behind by others." She felt that her education was beginning to pay off - the eldest child in the family. Tell her that the kindergarten teacher assigned a knowledge point and told them to just understand it. But now he has thought that other children may not only have learned and understood it, but someone may have memorized it secretly, so he must also memorize it.

"He has a strong sense of crisis now." Yao Menghan showed a satisfied smile. "For example, if there are some things he doesn't want to do, I will tell him that you can not do it, but you have to bear the consequences and risks of not doing it. He is very alert when he hears the word 'risk' now, and then he will Take the initiative to do this."

In this anxious and tense family atmosphere, the child has some changes that she did not expect. For example, she found that her eldest son started to swear, even though no one in the family could use swear words; the kindergarten teacher also told her that the child secretly took the kindergarten plasticine home, and now the children in the same class are isolating him, saying that he is a " Thief".

Yao Menghan immediately told the teacher that there was no shortage of plasticine at home, and it was impossible for children to "steal" it just because they wanted it. But because her child went to a public kindergarten, she didn't want to have any conflict with the teacher, so she still apologized to the teacher.

Back home, she told her child that it was wrong to take something that didn't belong to him, no matter the reason. But the child retorted and said, "Didn't you say that if you want something, just work hard for it?" After Yao Menghan explained to the child for a long time, he was frustrated to find that cultivating the child's sense of competition and educating him about "sharing" and "dedication" There is a contradiction between simplicity and virtue that she herself has not thought about.

" But no matter what, I will tell him that you have to fight for it. " Yao Menghan said. She has a story hidden in her heart that she plans to tell her child when he is older: when walking on a crosswalk, the normal traffic order should be "stop on red light, go on green light". But when the red light was still on, everyone chose to run the red light . Only one person obeyed the traffic order and stood still; and when the person who really obeyed the rules saw the green light and started walking, the passing vehicles It will assume that all pedestrians have passed, and it will knock down the person who really abides by the rules..

" I want my children to understand that they should not consider the fairness of system rules. Anyone who complains about unfairness does so because he is not a vested interest. Therefore, do not believe in the rules too much. " Yao Menghan felt that this was because he was unemployed. The most valuable lesson I ever learned.

The epidemic has torn apart our " fig leaf"

How many young people currently live a life that is glamorous on the surface, but in fact is full of debts? Maybe it’s because the so-called lice don’t itch, and debts don’t worry; maybe it’s because I’ve become insensitive to it; maybe it’s easy to get on the bus but hard to get off.

I have a friend, his name is Xiaotian, who is in the same situation as me. I don't know if he is under a lot of pressure, but it is impossible to say that there is no pressure. Many of my own problems have always existed. I have never calculated my financial income and expenditure on daily basis, and I rarely pay attention to the price of money. This is a very serious problem. Even if you cannot make ends meet, you still have to borrow money for consumption. This should be the state of many people today.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, with the layoffs of various large factories, the closure of small factories, and the inability to operate, each of us has to face our own real problems. Think about how many young people today are burdened with mortgages, car loans, rents, daily expenses and various high-end expenses. Once the monthly payments are cut off, to be honest, it will be a very difficult problem for them to survive. During the current epidemic, for those who are unemployed, the top priority is to solve their food and clothing problems, and secondly, they must try their best to maintain their various monthly payments. Especially for those who buy a house in Beijing, the monthly payment alone is more than 10,000 yuan. Just ask, under such great pressure, if there is no stable job income to support it, how can we survive?

The above mentioned are all normal expenses, and they are relatively large and fixed expenses every month. In addition, I believe many people are still using their credit to overdraft various advanced purchases. This kind of advanced consumption has always existed, but the current epidemic has exposed this abnormal consumption concept nakedly.

Of course this is my personal opinion, but my friend would not think so. I said that I lived a much more secure life 5 years ago than I do now. At least I don’t have so many thoughts, as if I have never had any The idea of ​​buying a house in Beijing is the same.

Human beings themselves are carriers of desires, but when they carry too many things, they can’t figure out what they really want?

Of course, when looking at problems, different people have different concerns. Just like this friend of mine, he said that 5 years ago, you might only have 5,000 yuan, but now even if you have 100,000 yuan in debt, you At least I have a house. In addition to this, you can also consider investing in your own hobbies. But 5 years ago, did you have this ability and idea? To put it bluntly, it's just that my ability is not enough to support my ambition, and that's why I feel that everything is not going well for me.

No matter what people around me say, I personally still feel that the epidemic is just a "fig leaf" for us. Although the epidemic has brought many adverse effects to our lives, have you ever thought that even if there was no epidemic, your life would not be at all crisis? Ask yourself, if you don't go to work for a period of time, or if your family is in urgent need of money, can your current situation support your living expenses for a year, half a year, or even a month? Having said all this, I still want to remind everyone that no matter what happens, you must always maintain a sense of crisis. Try your best to make your abilities sufficient to support your ambitions.