What is "involution of college students"?

If you want to ask the most popular online hot words among college students recently, "involution" definitely ranks first. Not only is it "involution", but its extension words such as "Don't roll", "It killed you" and "Too roll" have also become the darling that everyone often talks about. So, what is involution?

Baidu's explanation is that involution refers to the phenomenon that peers compete for limited resources and make more efforts, which leads to the decline of individual "income-effort ratio". It can be seen as the "expansion" of efforts. ?

Today's theme "College Students' Trenches" refers to irrational internal competition or "voluntary" competition among many college students.

Misunderstanding of involution

Presumably, when you hear the word "involution", many related scenes have emerged in your mind, and perhaps there are supporting text concepts. But here, the first thing I want to discuss with you is some misunderstandings about involution.

1.？ Entries = Busy?

Gu Ailing, a skier who blew up the world in the Winter Olympics, has been a hot figure on social media recently. It is understood that she started skiing at the age of 3, but in addition to skiing and winning medals, her life also includes studying piano, ballet, writing, modeling, and even entering Stanford University with a score of 1.580 (full score 1.600) through independent study. According to the standard of busy involution, Gu Ailing is definitely the king of involution among contemporary youth.

2.？ Internal volume = repeating boring study every day?

Lang Lang, a famous pianist in China, is recognized as one of the three greatest pianists in the world. According to the interview, he was born into a musical family and began to learn piano at the age of three. He practiced piano for no less than 8 hours every day for 30 years. As he began to practice in the early hours of the morning, his piano sound was nicknamed "alarm clock" by his neighbors. We know that practicing the piano for a long time is a boring thing. Assuming that it meets the standard of involution, Lang Lang has not participated in involution for 30 years.

3.？ Involution = doing more than others?

Students majoring in journalism at Communication University of China need to practice writing current affairs reviews. Teachers of related courses require students to hand in a review as homework on a regular basis. There is a student who wants to be a critic, because he has a strong desire to express current affairs and also wants to exercise his writing style, so he handed in two more articles than others, hoping that the teacher can beat himself more. If this is an internal paper, maybe it will inspire the whole class to hand in twice as much homework.

No, none of the above assumptions are involution. In my opinion, the key criterion for judging involution lies in its definition of "irrationality" and "voluntariness".

Gu Ailing is really versatile and gifted. But behind these achievements, it is the energy gained from 10 hours of adequate sleep every day, the undivided attention in front of any interest, and the time gained from self-study at the expense of the college entrance examination system.

Lang Lang does practice piano music day after day in boredom, but his talent and love are real. What's more, his attitude towards the piano has never changed. Practicing the piano for 8 hours every day can be said to be his unique rhythm, and it is difficult to be disturbed by the outside world.

And that journalism major is closest to our ordinary college students. Her behavior is more out of an irresistible desire to write. Even out of competition, if you don't have enough thoughts to settle down and just try your best to make up the number of words, the quality of your work will inevitably decline and the teacher will be disappointed.

Behind these examples are not "irrationality", but "talent, hard work, persistence, dreams, time management, choices and opportunities". The combination of various factors is reasonable and conforms to the law of human development. Their success is one step at a time, and there are traces to follow. By the same token, the final result of many people we admire may be amazing, but the process is nothing but extreme rationality and long-term rationality.

On the other hand, involution is on the opposite side of rationality, out of touch with the law, and it is crazy. Interestingly, many people in life can neither insist on long-term rationality nor long-term madness. Just as many college students can't insist on not being distracted in class, they can't insist on staying up late to review every day. The former is strong and unintentional, while the latter is weak. Because of this, I finally had to become mediocre.

In the university, we see students studying in the dormitory, in the library and in the study room, with materials at hand and tireless. I can't help but blurt out, "everyone is too curly." Many times this is just a joke. Because of the follow-up of online hot words, there may be an excuse to be lazy. It is hard to say that there is no such water in the inner scroll, which will have today's Jianghu status. After all, only those who are learning know whether they are in their own reasonable rhythm. If we have strengthened our faith, we need to be vigilant, not to be influenced by the trend of involution, to form self-doubt, and not to care too much about others.

The performance of college students' involution is 1. Learning has no rhythm of its own. There is no clear stage plan for the goal. Easily influenced by the rhythm of others, change your temporary plan.

2. Repeat inefficient labor. Worry too much about the future, overdraw your body, and don't rest when you should. Comfort your heart through outward efforts: I am working hard now.

3. Seek the quantity of results, not the quality. It is utilitarian to gain a sense of quantity accumulation, and it is better to choose the appearance of mines than the internal reserves of mineral deposits.

4.？ The value of time is measured by "usefulness" I can't concentrate, and I can't stand boredom. I always doubt whether the goal I choose is right or not, and I am afraid of wasting time.

Causes of degradation

(1) Self-expectation stems from the idea of looking at others.

"If I have never seen the sun, I can stand the darkness, but the sun has turned my desolation into a new desolation."

Emily Dickinson

Although involution has various manifestations in reality, its essence is a state of mind, which can hardly be called healthy and beneficial. Throughout thousands of years of history, it is generally believed that as long as the problems of survival, namely famine, war and plague, are solved, human beings can truly realize spiritual liberation. But in today's China, what we see is not the case.

Even though poverty alleviation makes many people worry about food and clothing, people want to eat more and better as long as they are alive; The powerful national strength saved people from the war, but today they are still fighting a war without smoke in the workplace; The progress of medical technology enables us to live to a hundred years old, but the length of life is not necessarily the length of happiness, but may be an extra extension of pain.

It can be seen that the living environment is not the key to restricting people's spirit, but human beings themselves, because our expectation of happiness always comes from our comparison with those around us, and comparison will lead to competition. Moreover, because the living environment is good and the population has increased, a large number of people have entered the same competition circle, fighting for the college entrance examination, scholarships, interviews and internships, places for postgraduate entrance examinations, and places for studying abroad. Everyone's spirit has begun to turn over.

Look at the whole society from a macro perspective: ordinary people look at the rich and feel that they are too poor, so they study hard and get into a good university. The rich look at the richer people and worry that their money will disappear one day, so they are afraid, and then they are entangled in the investment of funds and stocks.

From the microscopic point of view of college students: the college complains that there is no undergraduate course, and the company simply despises it; No one complained about the two books, and the resume was directly brushed; A complaint book does not have 985,211,which is no different from two books; 985,211complained that it was not big enough to go abroad. What should I do? I took the postgraduate entrance examination, so I entered another cycle.

Then we will find that people will never be satisfied and will only want to see what they don't have. For example, contemporary college students think that undergraduate courses have flooded, but in fact, the undergraduate rate in China is only 4.43%. In other words, undergraduates are actually very rare and valuable. Why do you always squeeze into those cities after graduation? As a result, the illusion of undergraduate flooding appeared, and you belittled yourself invisibly.

To sum up, involution is precisely because of human existence. It is true that we cannot eliminate involution by eliminating human beings. But we might as well try to change the perspective of looking at people around us and avoid falling into irrational competition and forming involution. If you have different ideas about others, they may not be hell.

(2) It is difficult to break through the high wall built by "institutionalization".

"A prisoner who has been in prison for decades said that institutionalization is like this prison. I was not used to it when I first came here. You feel uncomfortable everywhere and suppress you everywhere. However, after a long time, you are used to all this. "

-"The Shawshank Redemption"

Many college students are at a loss about the future and don't know what to do and what to do. But I don't think so. For everyone, happiness is simple: money, time and happiness. In order to be happy, some people want to be teachers, some people want to work in banks, some people want to be designers, and some people want to be ... So, what they want to be is not being at a loss, but the road to their goals. Almost all college students will bump into the high wall of "institutionalization" when considering methods.

"System" can be understood as an environment including certain rules, habits, consciousness and atmosphere. Since we set foot on the road of learning, "institutionalization" has subtly built a high wall for our thinking. Maybe when you were young, your elders would ask you what you want to be when you grow up, and you would give all kinds of fantastic ideas, such as "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up". But when we grow up, most of us choose not the answer at that time, or even a far cry from it.

Because in primary school, our attention was focused on getting into a good junior high school, getting into a good high school after getting into a good junior high school, and most importantly, getting into a good university. All kinds of changes are inseparable from their ancestors: good grades. This is a kind of institutionalization, which makes our thinking lazy and consciously avoids thinking about the future, because the society tells us through various channels that no matter what we want to do in the future, we must first get into a good school.

Examination has become a kind of "system", and its disadvantages are revealed when you go to college. Apart from exams, it is hard for students to believe that there is a safer and more life-changing way, and they dare not try to get out of their comfort zone. In fact, we are not sure whether the "postgraduate entrance examination" is correct, but instead of being confused, it is better to follow the crowd, get a peace of mind, get stage stability, and think about the future after stability. The so-called "after reading the dream road of college, you will know, and finally there are three exams, postgraduate entrance examination, textual research and examination." In this way, the road to success becomes single, and the definition of success begins to be homogeneous. If there are too many of the same things, start to roll over.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the college entrance examination itself. It is already the maximum fairness that society can provide. What is wrong is that we neglected to cultivate our own thinking on the road of growth. We read a lot of textbooks and teaching AIDS, but seldom read famous books at home and abroad; We brush questions day and night in training classes and small rooms, but rarely go outside to ask why the mountains are so high and the water is so deep; We are willing to spend three years fighting for the same research places, but we are not willing to use these three years to make our own innovations. In the final analysis, the school is an umbrella, and we are used to staying under it, afraid to step out and look directly at ourselves in the sun.

(3) The rise of "social media" contributed to involution anxiety.

"Building a house is in a humanistic environment, with no chariots and horses. Ask what you can do, your heart is far from self-centered. "

-Tao Yuanming

In order to avoid involution, one problem is how to keep absolute focus on what you choose, especially in a few years. However, with the rapid development of social media in recent years, especially since the media, it is increasingly difficult to focus. In this era when anyone can pick up the microphone to speak for themselves, the quality of the content spread becomes uneven. With the massive involvement of commercial utilitarian factors, anxiety has become an increasingly popular commodity.

"You don't need to buy a textbook, you can get a certificate directly in one month", "A person who has been to tell you which way to go to college is not feasible, don't let four years be wasted" and "Live for a month to earn a lot of money", which are aimed at human weakness, have gained a lot of traffic through media such as Tik Tok, Aauto Quicker, WeChat official account and WeChat operation group, and have grown wildly. Let the heart of college students, which was difficult to sink, surface again and get lost in the noisy air. Learning this for a while, learning that for a while, not returning to my heart, will only increase the volume.

In ancient times, if the war was too great, I could take my relatives and friends to find a peach blossom garden, have long hair and enjoy myself, and let the outside world change. I guarded my kindness; If the officialdom is vast, I can learn from Tao Yuanming, retire to the countryside, grow beans in Shannan, and study poetry at the same time, and my life is quite happy. But today, with the continuous expansion of urbanization, the network covers more and more areas and the pace of life is getting faster and faster. We find it difficult to find a place where we can settle down and study a thing.

Humans are building a paradise for material life on the earth, and at the same time they are building a cage for spiritual life. Maybe one day, we will lose all the real peace. Therefore, it is obviously the direction that everyone needs to work hard to pay attention to inner cultivation, learn to open up a quiet land in the heart and carry out lifelong learning.

The harm of involution (individual+society) to individuals

1.？ Narrow the field of vision.

Long-term involution will make you pay more attention to the results than the process, and you will be exhausted for limited rankings and the last few decimal places. If the result is good, the process will be affirmed; If the result is not satisfactory, the process will be rejected. What we often hear is the complaint after the failure of such challenges as "I failed in this university for three years" and "My efforts during this period are like a joke". At the same time, it is easy to be conservative, repeat the old path of seniors and sisters, and lose the courage to be explorers and pioneers.

2.？ Forget the pursuit of self

In the later period of involution, the most terrible thing is to lose yourself. At first, I just wanted to run faster than my opponent, so I included the rhythm of others in my plan. Later, I found myself living someone else's schedule and chasing the goals pursued by others. The most terrible thing is that the person you are chasing may also be chasing others, and so on and so forth, eventually returning to yourself and forming a closed loop. In this cycle, everyone is just a learning machine in each other's eyes, and there is no room for rest.

3.？ Lose the opportunity to experience life

University is a colorful world. Learning is important, but interest, love, travel, teamwork, clubs and so on are also very important experiences. After all, art comes from life, and those who have made great achievements in history regard their field as an art, not a pure job. Just like the same physical formula, the teacher tells the students about its derivation process, and most students will admire "this formula is really smart." But only a few people will say, "This formula is really beautiful!" The reason why these few people can often knock on the door of truth is that their enthusiasm for work is no less than their enthusiasm for art, and involution makes you unable to appreciate all kinds of beauty or even deny them.

To society

1. Slow down the pace of social progress

There is a funny plot in the movie "Three Silly Men vs Bollywood": In order to get a better ranking in the exam, a student not only worked harder than others all night, but also stuffed gossip and plaything magazines at the door of other dormitories before the exam in an attempt to distract his classmates from reviewing. This is not only a matter of volume, but also a manifestation of mental distortion. Imagine, if college students are in high positions after graduation in the future, will they deliberately slow down the pace of potential people because of the pressure of involution? Will the industry slow down or even shrink because of this, just as business develops to a certain extent, and it is easy to go to monopoly if the government does not take care of it.

2. The degree of social innovation has declined.

We now have a deliberately emphasized consciousness: "the existing social resources are limited", and the spread of this consciousness is an important reason for involution. In fact, it is true, except that there should be a second sentence, that is, "the upper limit of social resources can be raised." Just like the industrial revolution: artificial power is limited, we create steam power; When minerals are limited, we will develop electricity; The environment can't bear pollution, so we will develop clean energy such as solar energy and wind energy. The creation of new things is the key to raising the upper limit of social resources. However, involution makes us compete with each other around limited resources, giving up innovation and giving up the original broad road.

How to deal with the inner volume

1.？ Feel the grandeur of the world and your own smallness.

If you feel involved, you will be exiled to the wide world. We can climb mountains and climb to the top of the mountain, surrounded by clouds and mist, and it is quiet and distant. When we look down on the mountains, we will feel how small the human beings between heaven and earth are, and our mentality will be much more peaceful. We can also go to see the sea, watch the tides rise and fall against the sea breeze, our hearts will go further, and we will think about whether the current state is too tense and our vision is too narrow. The involution is like a dark little space, where the mind and body are at the same time. All we have to do is get some air.

2.？ Start with small things and relieve anxiety with a sense of ceremony.

Before you are busy eating in the morning, you can go for a walk in the playground first, and the breakfast after the morning run will become more delicious; Clean your desk before you do your homework. Wide desktop space can relieve the depression of hard work. When a person is in the dormitory, he can sweep the floor. It is convenient to take out the garbage when you go out. Cleaning for a few minutes every day is a good way to adjust your mood. More importantly, you create a clean environment to purify your inner anxiety. These little ceremonies will enrich your sense of gain every day bit by bit, and let you know that I have done so many things besides studying every day, so you can be a little proud.

3.？ Draw nutrition from classics and seize the flash of opportunity.

Reading is an important part of human lifelong learning. The knowledge in textbooks may be out of date, but extracurricular books will never be. Reading many classics can broaden your mind and sometimes even subvert the way you look at things. Help you change the monotonous chicken soup that "suffering is exercise", get rid of the arrogance that "everything can be done as long as you work hard", learn to maximize your potential, and seize and use fleeting opportunities, luck and inspiration. When you are studying, you will find that you are making progress every second, and every bit of knowledge is internalized as a part of yourself, which will suddenly appear to give you a push at some point in the future. The accumulation of classics makes you confident in the face of involution.

4.？ Practice deliberately and accumulate capital against the fast pace.

In this fast-paced era, new things emerge one after another, such as video editing, live broadcast with goods, programming algorithms, special effects of P-pictures, animation modeling and dubbing, which are dazzling and involve not knowing what to choose. But remember, the fastest iteration is often those forms of expression, not the core content creation. Content creation is the deepest core of the work, and all forms of expression serve it. The reason why content creation is not easy to be copied or iterated is because it needs to accumulate foundation and deliberate practice day after day.

Writing should have content and insist on writing thousands of words every day; Programming should have content and insist on writing a fixed number of lines of code every day; Oral expression should have content and insist on reading and reading at a fixed time every day. Reading breaks thousands of volumes, and writing is like a god. After 10, 20, 30 years of deliberate practice, content creativity will become your personal exclusive label and value. So that you don't have to blindly pursue new forms of expression, because they will find you, and you are truly unique.

5.？ Not only individuals but also countries should be considered.

Although we have always added "combining personal destiny with the destiny of the motherland" in our composition since childhood, we always forget in practice that this may just be a gap in the breakthrough of the internal volume. When we think about it carefully, we always think, "I will do whatever I want" and "I will do whatever I want", and the starting point is me. But if we think about what the country needs from another angle, we may find a bright spot. The country is a grand concept, but contact with the country will not be limited by your personal ability. You can if you want.

Finally, I attach an animated line that I am fascinated by recently. I wish you all a bright future.

"In this era of rapidly changing achievements and rankings, what should be taken to define the first?

Not just winning. It is precisely because runners have greater ideals and goals that they continue to run. "

-"The Wind Blows"