The Zhihu Malaise: Feeling Lost and Indulging in Fantasies in Your Twenties

The ages of 20–30 are already a time of dramatic changes in one’s worldview, values, outlook on life, circumstances, goals, social circles, and career plans. Add to that the maladies common in East Asia—involution, psychological manipulation, instrumentalism, objectification, malignant narcissism, lack of psychological differentiation, empty-self syndrome, and unresolved trauma—and people become even more lost.

From this perspective, this returns to the subject of my earlier piece, “35 Is a Turning Point.” Becoming independent at 35 means reaching maturity in one’s worldview, values, and outlook on life, simplifying one’s goals to the essentials, healing various psychological issues, getting the five elements of life on track, and so on.

Feeling lost -> idle fantasizing -> pseudo-concepts -> popular pseudo-theories -> banding together and excluding others -> feeling lost.

Too little reading, too little practice, too little experience of people, and too shallow an understanding of them.

One malady is the “I think I’ve read a lot” syndrome, best explained by the “Dunning–Kruger effect.” The peak of ignorance -> the valley of despair -> the slope of enlightenment. Not knowing that you don’t know -> knowing that you don’t know -> knowing that you know -> not knowing that you know.

In everyday life, people who have read one or two hundred books often feel they have read a lot. Those who have read four or five hundred begin to realize that the sea of learning is boundless, while human life is finite. Those who have read seven or eight hundred finally put together a rough framework.

Of course, the point of this article is not to deliver the usual paternalistic lecture to young people. In fact, one predicament young people face is that 28 is clearly still the early part of life, its beginning, yet in a society driven by utility and competitive comparison, it is the end of life (just look at the matchmaking scene).

Still, the sooner you die, the sooner you’re reborn: plenty of people find enlightenment after 30 and follow their own path. (At 29, I was still worrying about buying a home in Beijing and finding a partner through matchmaking. Only at 31 did I come to believe in Marxism-Leninism, and only at 35 did I find enlightenment through Zhuangzi.)