Another day living on the road in the RV, and I want to talk about something that happened recently.
A woman streamer decided to walk from Hangzhou to Shanghai and use a 'zero-cost' approach—essentially begging—to get through the trip. When she stopped at a restaurant to ask for a meal, the owner gave her a hard lesson: We help people who are in trouble, not people with money who want to play at being poor.
She filmed the exchange and posted it online, apparently expecting sympathy and a pile-on against the restaurant owner. Instead, she became the clown in her own traffic stunt—and the attention turned on her.
I almost never scroll Douyin. I only know about the account 'Jiawei Is Hungry' because I saw a YouTube video that took a deep dive into mukbang creators. That was how I learned about a food streamer with textbook NPD traits. He ties his personal charm to the food he gets by asking for it. The moment his supposed charm fails to get him what he wants, he sulks on camera or openly berates the shop.
People who choose traffic often overestimate their own 'charm.' The female streamer did the same. She assumed she was popular enough, so when she was rejected she automatically acquired the label of victim—and then used 'the weaker side is always right' to claim the moral high ground.
There is an odd coda to the assistant incident I mentioned earlier. After deleting every WeChat contact connected to us, the assistant posted on Moments that she had finally gotten rid of all the flies. After that whole collapse of her sense of self, she was searching for external approval to hold herself up. So she went back to the native family system she knew best—and had once described as the thing she hated most—believing it was a place that would accept all her imperfections.
The deeper reason people choose traffic is that they cannot see clearly who they are. Or rather, most of their self-understanding comes from external evaluations, to the point that they believe the version reflected back by those evaluations is the real them. But the performed part conflicts with the actual inner self—the part that originally shaped them. Imagine someone who learned to be calculating because his family was always scheming around him. He can play dumb while encroaching on someone else's interests and claim he was never taught such things. He knows the story does not hold together. Worse, if he has carelessly shown an insider his true side, the contradiction can trigger a more severe kind of cognitive dissonance: 'I have become the person I hate most, but that is my underlying nature.'
To choose traffic is also to gamble your personal charm on an external judgment you cannot control. And if those external judgments disappear, who are they? The RV sways a lot, but I know it is moving along the road toward a destination that is certain.