It’s been almost half a year since I started working.
At first, everything still felt fresh. I was getting paid, I had energy, and no matter how much I did, I didn’t feel especially tired. The next day I could just get up and go again with the same momentum.
But little by little, every day started feeling like a rerun.
In the beginning, I didn’t know how to do anything and was running around doing all kinds of odd tasks. Now I sit at a computer most of the time and do only a small amount of physical work. My schedule is regular too: start at eight, get off at five, home by five-thirty if nothing drags on. Even overtime is paid at 25 an hour. By all appearances, this should be manageable.
And yet I’m still exhausted.
Sometimes I’m tired even when I can’t point to anything I actually did. It’s not exactly emotional burnout. It’s simpler and harder to explain than that: going to work itself is tiring.
So I spend workdays waiting for the weekend. Then on the weekend I start dreading the arrival of tomorrow, because tomorrow means I have to go back to work. The week before a holiday drags endlessly; the holiday itself vanishes in a blink. Before the New Year arrives, you can’t wait for it. Once it’s here, you end up complaining that the years are passing way too fast.
These days, when I get home, my catchphrase is no longer the kind of cheerful line you hear in Japanese family dramas—"I’m home~~"
It’s: "Work is killing me~~ when can I stop working?"
My mom says, "You’re tired? Who isn’t? We’ve been working for decades. Isn’t this just how life is?"
My dad says, "If you’re that tired, switch jobs. But whatever you do, work is work. If it weren’t tiring, why would anyone call it a job?"
Hearing that does make me feel a little better for a moment. Then I go to my room, play on the computer, and the next day I go back to work. After work I come home and say the same line again.
Again and again.
Eventually my parents got tired of hearing it. At first they tried to comfort me. Later, when I said I was tired, they just replied with an absent-minded "mm." After that, not even that. They just carried on with whatever they were doing.
One day my dad finally got fed up and said, "Do you know who you sound like now?"
I said no.
"Xianglin Sao."
I asked why.
He said, "Her child was taken by a wolf, and she kept talking about it every day, over and over. At first people felt sorry for her. Later they got sick of hearing it."
That hit me immediately. I really was doing the same thing.
I remembered what teachers used to say when this text was taught in class: at first people sympathized with Xianglin Sao, and at the same time indulged the detached curiosity of being spectators. But nobody wants to keep absorbing someone else’s negativity forever. Eventually her suffering became something people joked about. And once even that stopped being interesting, her misery was treated as if it had no value at all.
Lu Xun really was mercilessly sharp. More than a century later, it still feels relevant. College graduates who can’t let go of their scholar’s pride get compared to Kong Yiji in a new era; those same people, still carrying that pride while complaining about hardship, can just as easily turn into a new generation of Xianglin Sao.
Online, I keep seeing people talking about their jobs too—being deceived, being worked like beasts of burden, staying late with no overtime pay, one bitter experience after another. But what can they really do? Mostly they just end up passing their frustration on to every person who scrolls past the video.
People who are truly happy usually don’t rush to post videos about their flawless work life. Maybe that’s a kind of survivorship bias. Or maybe not. It’s like Lu Zhanpeng said: "Graduate students don’t watch his videos; graduate students are busy researching things." People always imagine unknown lives as better than their own.
If I wanted to sound rational, I could say the way out of this Xianglin Sao trap is to correct your mindset, lower your expectations, improve yourself, and fight for a better future.
That all sounds nice.
But that kind of talk usually comes from people who have already benefited, from leaders who hand out empty promises, or from those speaking after they’ve already made it.
As for me, I’m one of the Xianglin Saos.
So what I actually want to say is this: Damn it, when can I save enough principal to quit, go home, lie flat, do some simple side work, and live off the interest?