China may be experiencing a “Renaissance”

There is always a logic in our textbooks: Ancient Europe was very dark, and suddenly there was a Renaissance. After the Renaissance, the people were liberated from the feudal theocracy, and then there was the great explosion and the great voyage. There was the industrial revolution.

I never quite understood this logic before, but in recent years I suddenly understood it.

We all know that the Middle Ages were barbaric and dark, and the church controlled everything.

One of the church’s worst tactics is its “explanation of the meaning of life.”

Ever since everyone became sensible, they can’t help but ask themselves a question: What is the purpose of living in this life?

If you are an Indian, you must cultivate the afterlife and become a Brahmin in your next life.

If you are a European medieval person, it must be “the Kingdom of Heaven”. You should be abstinent in this life and spend little or no money. It is best to donate it to the church so that you can go to heaven after death. They can’t say clearly what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. Anyway, it’s very good and everyone wants to go to the Kingdom of Heaven.

You may be wondering, is there any problem with this?

In fact, it’s not a big problem. It’s good for people to have some pursuits and some faith.

But there is a problem. This concept has locked up the entire society.

Think about it, you have made money, you have to abstain from sexual intercourse and never spend money, and you are not the only one with this idea, everyone thinks the same way, then if you open a milk tea shop or a restaurant on the street, it will also No one will go to spend money, and these stores will close down soon.

In other words, no industry can develop except farming.

The church tells everyone that they should save money and don’t think about anything. When they are about to die, donate money to the church to build towering churches and big domes.

You may have discovered that without the starting point of “consumption”, nothing will happen.

In fact, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Western Europe soon became incomparable to the Muslim world.

What’s even more cruel is that this logic is a closed loop. If you want to change this kind of thinking, the church will not agree with it. At least it will be exiled, and at worst, it will be directly grilled.

What’s more important is that the common people will not agree. They think that everything the church says is right, and any disobedient behavior will be punished. It will not matter if they cannot enter the kingdom of heaven after death. What if they go to hell, and they will be oiled every day? If it explodes, that would be terrible.

After this concept reached its peak in the 14th century, it slowly began to change.

At the beginning, the “Crusaders” went to fight in the Middle East, where they saw the prosperous world outside.

Yes, the Islamic world was much more open and prosperous than Western Europe at that time.

After those soldiers returned to Western Europe, they spent decades describing to children how beautiful the world in the Middle East was, like an old cow chewing its cud. Everyone will naturally yearn for that kind of life.

Then came the Black Death, a disease that has plagued us for hundreds of years without end.

Everyone can’t understand the Black Death, and they think everything is God’s will. Since God does this, there is God’s reason for it. The church says that this thing is a plague sent by God to punish the sinners in the world.

Then a lot of the church’s own people died due to the Black Death, and no one, the priests or the nuns, could escape.

Moreover, the Black Death, as an infectious disease, was more lethal to people who gathered together. Organizations like churches, which lived in groups, suffered particularly serious casualties.

People began to question whether the church could not represent God.

It should be noted here that the Black Death did not shake everyone’s faith in God, but the influence of the church was shaken.

Later, the result of the collapse of the church’s credibility was the “rise of all heroes”, with countless Protestants trying to replace the original Catholicism.

There was constant conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and initial attempts were made to negotiate a solution to this ideological schism.

Later, they found that they couldn’t tell each other, and it eventually evolved into the “Thirty Years’ War” that swept across Europe, and half of the people in Europe died.

What is even more troublesome is that in the process of authority collapse, it is not that people no longer trust that authority, but that they gradually transition to confronting authority in everything.

After the influence of Catholicism gradually collapsed, everyone began to think in the opposite direction.

With the impression of the Muslim world brought back by the Crusaders, a ghost began to hover over Europe. More and more people began to give up their obsession with “entering the Kingdom of Heaven” and began to think about the most important thing, which is the meaning of life. What?

People are slowly beginning to realize that the most important meaning of life is to live the life in front of them as well as possible. So how can we live it well?

Cherish the life in front of you.

The Renaissance has been talked about for hundreds of years, but the core is actually this thing: cherish the present life, enjoy the present life, and don’t think about the afterlife or the next life.

This change in thinking may seem small, but on a hundred-year scale, it has a huge impact.

Because once you start pursuing real-life pleasure, it will release part of your consumption power.

In addition, the Black Death also had a side effect, which was that it killed the population so hard that the wages of those who survived increased.

As incomes rise, minds are liberated again, people begin to consume, and the economy slowly picks up.

Everyone wanted to wear good-looking clothes, so the Italian textile industry began to explode and hired a large number of technical personnel. These technicians have wages and can spend money.

There was another important consumer product at that time, which was spices.

This thing is abundant in Southeast Asia, and the West thinks it is in China.

So the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople and blocked trade routes. As a result, the spices in Western Europe became less available, and the people did not restrain themselves and spent a lot of money to buy them. As a result, the price of spices skyrocketed.

This also led some people with flexible minds to start exploring new waterways and looking for business routes to the East.

This pioneering journey was very, very difficult. In the hundreds of years that followed, most of the people who went out and came back would die.

But stimulated by a profit rate of over 800%, everyone is venturing to the East one after another. The Age of Discovery also began, and later the “Spice Islands” were found in Southeast Asia.

The greatest significance of the Age of Discovery is the formation of the global market.

More importantly, everyone’s needs are becoming more and more demanding.

For example, who would have known that ordinary people love tobacco so much. This stuff was first discovered in the Americas. Europeans couldn’t stop smoking it and were willing to pay a high price. The UK first made its first pot of gold from tobacco.

In addition, there are tulips, which were originally used as royal flowers by the Ottoman wealthy families. After they were introduced to Europe, everyone wanted to put a few at home.

Although the tulip bubble occurred later, tulips have always been the pillar industry of the Netherlands. Now the Netherlands can still make a lot of money every year by selling tulips.

In addition, many people know about the black slave trade, so why did the Europeans take the black slaves to America? Grow cotton!

Cotton was grown in Europe and brought to England to be woven into pure cotton clothes, replacing the previous linen material.

From the perspective of traditional Catholicism, this is too degenerate. They don’t wear linen clothes properly, smoke, and put flowers at home.

But it was these messy, frivolous things that formed the trade network of the Age of Discovery.

Early globalization was mainly about buying and selling consumer goods for enjoyment.

The trade routes maintained by the British Navy transported cotton, tobacco and spices.

During the weaving process, another “unimagined road” slowly unfolded in front of everyone.

At that time, there were so many people who wanted to buy pure cotton clothes that the British dragged half of the country to London and other big cities to engage in textile manufacturing.

But with so many people living in the city, heating in winter became a problem. Even if all the surrounding trees were cut down, it was still not enough.

People had no choice but to dig coal on a large scale, but the drainage problem could not be solved during the coal mining process, so the mine owners offered large rewards for drainage solutions. Finally, in the dark and damp mine, one of the greatest things in human history was born — the steam engine.

Later, the steam engine was used in textile looms to continue weaving cloth and making clothes.

Therefore, if we look at the more than 600 years since the Renaissance, mankind has made a leap in a short period of time, transitioning from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization, and from backward feudalism to modern society.

The core driving force is the yearning for the beauty of real life.

If you want to eat delicious food, you have the Age of Discovery;

Want to get dressed and have a steam engine;

Yearning for poetry and distance, with movies and cars;

…

So why do I say that China has reached this point now?

In fact, Chinese people naturally do not have the same burdens as those in the West, but they have never thought clearly about the question of “what to live for.”

In other words, China does not have Catholic canons, but it has more insecurities about the real world.

This kind of insecurity leads to the natural instinct of everyone to save money to prepare for the winter.

Especially the previous generation is naturally inclined to suppress consumption, suppress real enjoyment, and prepare to live a good life “in the future”.

When I get older, I find that my life is really frustrating and I have enjoyed nothing in my life.

On the one hand, this may be due to being too poor before, and any wasteful behavior needs to be suppressed mentally;

On the other hand, China was influenced by the Orthodox culture of the Soviet Union in its early days. It admired saint-like figures like Paul and felt that it was necessary to suffer in order to be at ease.

This is why China naturally has a deflationary trend, because everyone can’t help but tend to save money for the winter. They cannot consume much of what they produce, and they always rely on overseas purchasing power.

If overseas purchasing power weakens slightly, China will have to deflate.

In addition, many people have the obsession to “be superior to others”. If you cannot become “superior to others”, then you deserve to live a miserable life.

In the end, everyone worked together, and almost everyone was a loser, because “people are better than people” is originally a game in which all people participate. It is impossible for everyone to win. The final winner can only be a small number of people.

But it’s clear that perceptions are changing significantly in recent years.

The main reason is that after the economic slowdown, the previous path of “suffering the hardship of studying and becoming a good person” has almost become the same. It is becoming increasingly difficult to turn over by studying.

The reason is not complicated. The reason why I was able to turn over in the past was not because of the useful knowledge, but purely because of the scarcity of college students.

Now that the track is packed with people, it’s getting harder and harder to get ahead.

This is not to say that knowledge will be useless in the future, but that the expectations of society as a whole are being significantly lowered.

More importantly, more and more people are realizing a problem: this life is very short, and the time to truly enjoy life is even shorter.

Whether you can win in the end depends on whether you are enjoying what you are doing.

If you are good at something and don’t feel tired when doing it, you can go much further than others.

As you gain more experience, you get better at it.

This is why in the past two years, there have been a large number of Internet celebrities with very low academic qualifications but making a lot of money.

The reason is not complicated. In terms of reading, he is not as good as you; in terms of eloquence, there is a huge gap between you and him.

I also know someone who has been losing weight for ten years and has accumulated rich experience. He makes several million a year by helping people lose weight.

It may become a pattern in the future, or it may already be here: don’t use your hard work to challenge other people’s interests.

Almost all people who are doing well in life, you see them working hard, but in fact they are not working hard at all, and they enjoy it, and only then can they go further.

To put it more directly, everyone’s breaking point is most likely the part that they like the most, are most passionate about, and are the most effortless to do.

Or to put it another way, if you can’t win in the areas that you are good at and passionate about, can you win in the areas that others are good at?

You might say, if I’m not good at anything, will I be mediocre for the rest of my life?

Is it possible that 90% of us are inherently mediocre?

The vast majority of people are actually torn between being unwilling and incapable of action. They want to do what they want to do, but they can’t let go of their current job.

As a result, most people spend their golden days living in confusion, then get married and have children, and their lives pass in the blink of an eye.

So I say that China is clearly at a point now: everyone may have realized that things like studying and struggling are becoming less and less cost-effective, and they are beginning to rethink the meaning of life.

Try to make your life exciting and try your best to do what you want to do, and you may gain happiness and career at the same time;

If you live like an animal, you will most likely have neither happiness nor career.

I can’t describe what kind of life is wonderful, but one thing that is certain is that you should try to do as many things as you like, try to think about what you want to do most in this life, make a list, and slowly implement it.

And everyone should also notice that only if everyone rekindles their yearning for a better life and consumes the things they like, can the entire economy get better and be sustainable.

Now that we have the resources and conditions to make everyone happy, whether we can live well may be a matter of mentality.

In short, the Chinese people are experiencing China’s “Renaissance”. More and more people are letting go of entanglements, enjoying life now, thinking about what they really want, not entangled when playing, and motivated when working hard. Everyone is happy Be able to pursue what you really want.

Only by being happy from the bottom up can society maximize happiness.