Our Joys and Sorrows Are Not the Times'

I promised myself one article a week, and here we are in week five, only just starting the second one. I honestly didn't know what to write. No editor chasing a deadline, no purpose, no sense of an audience — just picking a topic gives me a headache. I thought about writing on "carbon neutrality," a sector I've been watching for half a year, but I have no framework and don't know where to begin.

Every day, one nerve in my brain frets about this. Unless I GTD it and clear it out, the pent-up pressure isn't good for my body. So I'll just write something casual and call it a warm-up!

And now, to the point:

Lu Xun said: "The joys and sorrows of human beings are not shared."

Not only that — in my humble opinion, a person's joys and sorrows are not shared with their times, either.

This sounds a bit counterintuitive. News today travels faster and further than ever before. Because everyone is so acutely sensitive to the big events and big trends of the age, we assume that individual fate is closely bound up with the times.

That isn't wrong, but it isn't entirely right either.

First, every era is a mix of good and bad.

In 2021 the world saw inflation it hadn't seen in 30 years, a chip shortage swept the globe, the internet went through an unprecedented platform crackdown, and young people lived in a state of being "torn": on one side, pride in the rise of the nation; on the other, a personal view of the ceiling on survival and advancement — small cities in decline, sky-high housing prices in big cities, "involution" in education and credentials, fierce competition, and a road upward that seemed to grow ever longer and harder.

That year was dubbed "the worst year of the past decade and the best year of the decade to come."

And yet I've now seen that same verdict five years running. Let's pick a few other years from history at random.

1900

Waves of strikes swept across Europe;

Famine in India left millions on the brink of death;

During the Boxer Uprising, several hundred Boxers burned the church at Dazhai Village in Qinghe, Zhili, before returning to Shandong;

The Qing government offered a bounty of 100,000 taels of silver for the capture of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, and strictly forbade the public from buying or reading the newspapers they ran;

In the Blagoveshchensk massacre, Tsarist Russia slaughtered the Qing subjects living in Blagoveshchensk; more than 5,000 people were killed.

1988

Chinese and Vietnamese forces fought a naval battle at Johnson South Reef in the Spratly Islands;

The 7th National People's Congress confirmed its decision to accept Zhao Ziyang's request to resign as Premier of the State Council;

The world's longest supertanker, the Knock Nevis (then the Seawise Giant), was hit and sunk by missiles from Iraqi warplanes;

Iran Air Flight 655, flying an international air corridor over the Persian Gulf, was mistaken by a US Navy warship for an Iranian fighter jet and shot down by a missile; all 274 passengers and 16 crew on board were killed.

In any year, there are people lamenting that "people aren't what they used to be" and that "the future is bleak." Some years bring more good things, some more bad. But even in the worst of years, the sweetness of life still has a chance to arrive.

This realization came to me from the book Pingru and Meitang. Its author, Rao Pingru, was born in 1922 and lived through the War of Resistance against Japan and the Cultural Revolution — a life of hardship, uprooted again and again. Yet even amid war, the sweetness and bitterness of his life didn't rise and fall with affairs of state; they came from life itself. (I recommend the book — I may write about it later, which would conveniently give me another topic.)

As the picture of life and history slowly unfolds with age and with more reading, I feel more and more clearly that individual joys and sorrows are not shared with the times — perhaps this year the flames of war are everywhere, yet someone happily finds their life partner; perhaps this year the economy is booming, yet someone suffers the loss of both parents.

I believe: fate and happiness are related, but not equal.

How to create my own meaning and small certain happinesses in an ever more uncertain era — I'm just as lost. But here are three sayings that can guide us:

(1) Pessimists are right; optimists succeed;

(2) The accumulation of wealth depends not on how many times you make the right call, but on how big a bet you dare to place when you're right;

(3) The accumulation of happiness depends not on the intensity of any single happy moment, but on the frequency and number of joyful experiences.

The third comes from Harvard's happiness course. Research shows that few experiences affect us for longer than 3 months; a person who has a dozen small joys every day is happier than one who has only a single great stroke of luck.

So put on a comfortable pair of shoes, give the one you love a big kiss, treat yourself to a good meal. These things sound small, and they really are small things, but their effect is huge.