Didn’t do anything meaningful

I recommend an article to you and you will understand after reading it.

I have always been an uncertain person, at least in my mother's opinion.

Since elementary school, when everyone was chasing and fighting, I would also chase and fight, but soon I would sneak into the river to bask in the sun alone. When I was in junior high school, everyone started falling in love early, and I started falling in love too, but soon I found that it was more fun to assemble a radio. When I was in high school, I either became a gangster, or I was obsessed with "answering difficult questions in various high school subjects and key breakthroughs in extracurricular training". I was busy selling cheap socks and greeting cards in various dormitories, and occasionally dumped a few boxes of instant noodles. When I was in college, I basically didn't do my job. I traveled around and bought and sold. Everyone was serious about falling in love, and I was also in love, but I wasn't very serious about it.

My dad’s evaluation of me is that I never do anything when it’s time to do something. This made him very worried.

This kind of worry runs through the entire communication between our father and son. For example, when it was time to fall in love, I stopped dating, and when it was time to get married, we still didn't get married. Although these matters were settled later, he had many long talks with me at that time.

But no matter how we talk about it, in my opinion, the so-called things I should do are actually what he thinks I should do, not what I want to do. Fortunately, although my dad had a heart-to-heart talk with me, he didn't force me very much and just let me, so I have no future now, and I don't have the nerve to blame him. If the young man doesn't work hard, the boss will have nothing to worry about. I don’t have any siblings, I’m the eldest.

When I was about 22 or 23 years old, I started to be qualitative. Qualitative means working hard, going to and from work, making money and saving money, and traveling around on a motorcycle. Later, I bought a motorcycle for 3,000 yuan. The car was sold to Qiu Yao for 3,500 yuan, and he exchanged it for a 2020 Beijing Jeep with a green shell for 4,000 yuan. Dedeser drove it for a year and a half without a driver's license, and then sold it again for 4,500 yuan.

Later I understood that life is just like going back and forth, just like when I set up a stall under the Nanjing West Road overpass to sell gloves and woolen hats. I was unlucky enough to meet a plainclothes urban management officer, and I lost all my money. It's normal to borrow money to buy goods and then sell them. The important thing is to practice good kung fu. When the situation is not right, pick up the four-corner rope spread on the ground, turn around and run away.

I had no money at that time, so for a while I earned a monthly salary of 450 yuan in a hot pot restaurant in Baihuazhou. My biggest ambition at that time was to save 200 yuan so that I could have a good meal at a private restaurant across the street. Fortunately, I can also take a beautiful girl to eat Dole Burger. When I was kicked out by my boss for knocking over a plate of quail eggs, I suddenly felt that life was nothing but hopeless.

Later, I received a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan. I smiled proudly and ran to the door of a private restaurant, but suddenly I lost my appetite. Without beautiful girls around me, Dole Burger would have closed down a long time ago. Even the hot pot restaurant where I worked has turned into a fashion store with beautiful flowers and charming girls.

I lost the motivation to eat hard, and suddenly felt that the previous years of struggle were meaningless.

After that, I kept tossing, working crazily, playing around with nothing, starting a company with enthusiasm, going bankrupt and closing out of business, and then repeated it over and over again.

When I was thirty years old, I suddenly discovered that what I called determinism meant that there was no permanent nature. Then I decided to work hard and live seriously. This made my life seem to have meaning, and everyone praised me for being a reliable, good young man who is motivated, smart, hard-working, obedient and well-behaved. Now we are middle-aged, and we will soon become old.

It’s just that they still can’t understand my life.

I fought in the field, so I spent three to four thousand to buy a complete set of equipment, from PP dogs to camouflage uniforms, and even a German helmet, but the soles of my field boots never got muddy.

When I fish, a pole costs more than a thousand yuan, and I can’t tell how much I spend on a complete set of equipment. My mother estimates the price of the fish I catch, which is about seventy yuan according to the market price. I didn't dare tell her that fishing on the farm also costs money. These fish actually cost more than a hundred. One day, I saw a fish die, and suddenly I didn’t want to fish anymore, so I gave all my equipment to Ning Kuan. Ning Kuan is still grateful to me.

I was interested in photography and changed several sets from D90 to D300. My dad once again told me worriedly that SLRs were poor for three generations. So I didn’t invest any more. I bought many books and added more than 100 activity groups on Douban. But I have never read or researched it seriously. The DSLR is used as a point-and-shoot camera. Zhang Longhui said that the important thing is not the lens, but the head behind the camera. I think this head may not be very easy to use, so forget it.

I started collecting stamps when I was six years old. I had no money, so I often dug into the trash cans and went to the doorman to secretly tear other people's envelopes. Later, I found that this did not solve the problem, and the stamps in large-scale circulation were not good, so I encouraged the children in the yard to play stamp collecting with me, so that I could sell stamps from Guangzhou to them. The stamps of Grenada, St. Vincent and Dominica were also Beautiful and exquisite, the key is that it is very cheap. The key is that they don't know how cheap it is. The stamps purchased for one dollar boldly sell them for eight or ten dollars. So I saved a small fortune and learned how important information asymmetry is.

My information comes from a "philatelic" magazine that comes to the county post office every month. There is only one. I had to steal my dad's cigarettes to honor the fat man who sold books. I remember his name was Ai Niuzi, who was very artistic. name. When I bought the magazine, I could order it by mail according to the catalog advertisement, while other people didn't know until many years later that this was how the stamps were flipped. At that time, my business partner in Guangzhou was named Lu Junxiong. He rode a 28-wheeler and sold stamps everywhere. He later became the richest man in Guangzhou and one of the top ten richest people in China. Later, he ran away due to debt. This name can still be found on Baidu. There were several people on the rich list that year - Shi Yuzhu, Mou Zhongzhong, Lu Junxiong, Liu Yonghao...

When I was twenty-four years old, I suddenly felt that I wanted to do something meaningful, so I gave the entire collection to my eight-year-old cousin, thinking I could cultivate his fine taste and carry on my legacy. Later I learned that he had exchanged all my possessions for game currency. Now he is studying at the Ocean University of China. His hobbies are collecting various shells, seaweed and bikini girls. I spent a lot of money to buy a lot of stamps last year, but I sorted them out for three days without a clue. I stuffed them all in a bookcase and never touched them again. I miss the stamps I picked up from the trash can, even though I now have thirty or fifty of the same ones.

However, from collecting stamps, I understood that information is very important, so I started reading - reading books that had nothing to do with reading, the kind that did not study well, such as the humanistic stories of Zhiyin Story Club I have been reading social science books since I was in fifth grade, so when Sister Feng said she loved reading, she was such a damn close friend.

I am currently reading "Das Kapital" and taking notes while reading. I plan to create a discipline that I call "Idealistic Economics". I don't know what it is created for. What I read before was "The Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling", the original work. Before that, there was "Shi Hanbing on China's Economy", a pirated version. Before that, there were "A Brief History of Everything" and "The Greatest Chaos in History", interspersed with 15 magazines per month. When I read, I seem to have no direction, no goal, no choice. I read whichever book I pick. I don’t know what the purpose of reading is. I take notes while reading and occasionally check it on Baidu. But after reading, writing, checking, and then forgetting, I forget, and I don’t want to think about it.

Before writing these incomprehensible words, I also practiced piano and violin for two hours. I bought two pianos, one is a conventional piano, and the other is an electric piano. The electric piano has a more dazzling shape, a bright red S-shape, like Chen Meila’s. Unfortunately, I don’t have Chen Mei’s hot figure, and the clothes Playing the piano in pajamas is more like a down-and-out artist performing on the street, but my mother considers my piano skills to be "similar to sawing firewood." I am very calm about this, because I only started learning piano when I was twenty-five years old. I learned it for a month and had four lessons. Then I felt it was cold and stopped going. I haven’t practiced either. Until my teacher Huang no longer remembers me. One day I remembered that I seemed to be paying tuition for a quarter. I wonder if I can continue practicing? But I think even the color TV only has a one-year warranty, so I guess this won’t be renewed. So I took out the nearly moldy piano from the closet and started practicing again and teaching myself. I was delighted to find that my ability to saw firewood was about the same as it was ten years ago. Anyway, our whole family couldn't tell that I was playing the Happy Birthday song.

Now I practice with the electric piano every day, because I can only have time after nine o'clock, and the sound of the piano is too loud. Although it is beautiful, it will inevitably affect the 80-year-old grandfather next door. The electroacoustic piano does not have a sound box, so it should not affect the audience below the third floor. But I felt that my playing was so good that no one could share it with me. I felt a little lonely without anyone to listen to it, so I recorded a piece of "Schindler's List" on my mobile phone and sent it to Shi Tingting. She texted back and said, can you make this part of City in the Sky more reliable?

Sometimes I count the numbers on my hands and find that I have really done a lot of things in this half of my life, including astronomy and geography, the sky is high and the sea is vast, and I have touched on all the arts and martial arts, but it seems that I have not done much. Any thing can make me settle down and prosper, even if it is to support my family. As so-and-so and so-and-so asked, do you play the piano? What's the point? Do you take photos? What's the point? Reading these useless books? What's the point?

It really doesn’t make sense. Judging from the current situation, based on the cumulative trend analysis of the past thirty-five years, I think I have become a musician, economist, politician, photographer, and military strategist. The possibility should not be greater than 0.1%. The only thing that may be of some significance is that I bought too many philatelic magazines, all for the purpose of studying advertising. Later, a very important period of my career was engaged in advertising. Industry, I don’t know if it is necessarily related to the advertisements in those philatelic magazines. But I miss Lu Junxiong, the poor boy who rode a 28-year-old bicycle and entered the rich list. He used to be my friend, and now he still owes me 115 yuan for stamps that have not been sent.

It seems that whether it is Lu Junxiong or me, whether it is a rich man in the past or a little bastard now, it has no practical significance. The only thing that is true is that I am still alive, strong, not too healthy, and have no energy left.

Since I was a child, my dad has tried to persuade me to create a meaningful life, but he was really unable to explain the meaning of meaning clearly, so he gave up on this effort.

Yesterday, he was chatting with me and said, now think about it, why can't people do things according to their own hearts in life? Do what you want to do, what you like to do, and what makes you happy.

I said, yes, haven’t I been doing it? Luckily, you kept letting me do it too.

From the perspective of success studies, my life is really terrible - lazy, not enterprising, spending a lot of time on meaningless things that do not create value. While I was reading Das Kapital, I was thinking, why am I like a surplus value?

In fact, since I was a child, I have been chased by meaning. I have been taught that the meaning of my existence is to become the successor of communism. I was told that the meaning of my existence is to be a person who is beneficial to the people, a person who serves the people, and a person who is free from vulgar taste. I am required to be a good person, a good man, a good child, a good employee, a good boss, a good husband, a good father, this or that.

It’s just that no one has ever told me how I should be myself.

In the past, I felt that I might have been escaping. Now, I feel like I may have been returning.

The truest self is a shore that can be infinitely close but can never be reached. It looks as chaotic as the unreliable piano I play. But I like to listen to it myself.

In this world, the meaning is always so profound, the opinions are always so rich, and there is fake nobility everywhere.

When there is too much meaning, you want to escape, escape to a meaningless corner, extinguish this thing of meaning, and resurrect meaning without meaning.

If I can’t save myself, what’s the point of saving the world?

My dad chatted with me for a long time, and after a little silence, he said quietly, since you don’t plan to live a meaningful life, then you might as well live a more interesting life.