Major events in Shaanxi are being tightly suppressed; I doubt many inside the Great Firewall even know about it. I am so shocked!! A full ten-minute display of the life of an unemployed person—I didn't want to live anymore after watching! Qiqi Baba TALK Episode 1022, 20261106
In this episode, host Qiqi shares two parts of content. First, she recounts the news of Bai Baoguo, an associate professor of piano at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts at Yan'an University in Shaanxi, who left a final note and passed away after failing to meet funding and paper publication quotas and refusing to engage in fraud, pointing out the cruel reality that inside the system cannot tolerate outliers; next, she reads a realistic-fiction life narrative about a middle-aged unemployed person going through joblessness, delivering food, and repositioning their life, demonstrating the struggles and reflections of ordinary people under economic downturns and social pressures.
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Hello, everyone, welcome to Qiqi Baba, I am Qiqi. This is something that really shocked me today. It happened in October, but I only found out about it now. So, I uh think only a minority of people know about it, and inside the Great Firewall, there are probably even fewer. The censorship has reached such an extent. Even though the official authorities actually responded to this incident, it still couldn't get out, it still couldn't get out. They just put on a show, but in reality they are covering up and blocking this news.
That is, Bai Baoguo, an associate professor of piano at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts at Yan'an University in Shaanxi, chose to leave this world just last month. And according to rumors online, his final note said that because he failed to meet a lateral funding requirement for two consecutive months, and on top of that, his hard metric for paper publications was judged as unqualified, he might be demoted.
But why did this outcome happen? It's because he actually refused to participate in self-financing fake grant turnover—that is, he didn't raise funding for projects that actually do nothing—and he was also unwilling to pay money to publish papers to fake empty shell papers. Furthermore, in his final letter, he also exposed various internal problems at the school, such as people drawing salaries without doing work.
So after this letter came out, the school confirmed its authenticity, which also confirmed his death. Then the Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education immediately said, we have set up a special joint investigation team to conduct a comprehensive investigation into this school. Of course, right here and now, without even waiting to see what happens next, we can expose them directly—they are definitely just putting on a show. The reason I gasped seeing this news is that after so many years, thousands of years have passed.
Yet the people on that land of China still can only choose this way to put up some resistance against the authorities. Uh, all along, the entire society has been like an invisible, suffocating giant net hanging over everyone's head, constantly suffocating people! As long as you raise your head, this net slams onto your face densely and overwhelmingly! You have no way out at all, you can't breathe. Then how can you breathe? Only if you kneel down, lower your head, can you barely gasp a couple of breaths to linger on and stay alive.
It is just such a state. I remember previously, some people inside the Great Firewall, who were rather idealistic, argued with me that the CCP government isn't entirely evil people, and that there are good "parental officials" as well. But, uh, you've seen the reality, right? If you don't believe me, you can read more history books, and you'll find out—I mean real history books, real history isn't those casual popular history reads, I mean real history—that if a person refuses to wallow in the mire with others, they will be kicked out of the system immediately.
No matter by what means, he will be kicked out immediately. Standing out like a crane among chickens is absolutely 10,000% impossible there. Even if a crane among chickens really appears—meaning a crane standing in a flock of chickens—it is only because the leader chicken wants to use this crane to do something. As soon as it's used up, it will be discarded immediately, or it is just a pawn put there for show.
No one likes an anomaly to appear in their own group. This is human nature, and we must admit it. That's why we have been calling for freedom of speech. Ah, there are boundaries; freedom of speech means accepting viewpoints different from one's own. Why emphasize these things? Because our instinct is simply to dislike having an anomaly in the group we live in, regardless of whether this anomaly is good or bad.
Let's give two examples. For instance, from the perspective of ordinary people—it's better for everyone to imagine it, easy to put yourself in the shoes—we are all ordinary people living normal lives, right? We haven't thought about hurting anyone, or using cruel means to do evil things to others. So under such circumstances, we definitely wouldn't like having a perverted serial killer living in the community where we reside, right?
Right? When we hear about it, we would definitely run away, and we wouldn't want him to exist among us. In fact, the reverse is also true: how could a group of perverted serial killers comfortably accommodate a normal ordinary person? Even if the ordinary person is willing to stay inside, those serial killers wouldn't allow him to stay there; they would either destroy him or kick him out. This is a part of human nature. Therefore, why do I say that in the entire Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government, no matter who you arrest, none of them is innocent? Because as long as he can survive in this system for a long time, he is definitely not clean.
Today's life scenario experience: the life of an unemployed person. I lost my job when I was 38 years old. That morning, I still got up at 7:20, brushed my teeth, washed my face, put on my shirt, and stuffed my laptop into my bag. My wife was frying eggs in the kitchen, and my son was sitting by the dining table reciting English vocabulary words, everything just like the past decade or so. The only difference was that I knew once I went to the company today, I wouldn't be coming back. The previous afternoon, HR called me into the conference room. There was a bottle of mineral water on the table, and I still remember that bottle of water to this day, because when people are having bad luck, they tend to remember particularly useless things—such as the air conditioner in the conference room being set a bit cold, the HR person constantly spinning a pen, and the manager avoiding eye contact with me.
He said the company is also facing difficulties right now, and this is mainly organizational optimization, not a problem with your personal ability. I had said this sentence to others before, so as soon as he uttered the words "organizational optimization", I knew what would follow. I had worked at that company for 11 years, from age 26 to 38. When I got married, I was there; when I bought a house, I was there; when my son was born, I was still answering customer calls in the hospital hallway. I used to think that as long as a person is willing to endure, they can gradually become a senior employee of the company. Only later did I learn that the words "senior employee" are sometimes not a moat, but a depreciation rate. When you are young, the company thinks you are capable; when you get older, the company begins to calculate whether the same amount of money can buy two younger people instead.
I took the severance pay, which was not a small amount. That night, I even acted quite relaxed. I told my wife it was okay, just a good time to rest for a while and look for a job slowly. She also said, "With so many years of experience, why be afraid of not finding one?" We both laughed. Looking back now, we really didn't understand unemployment at that time. We thought unemployment was just a short extra vacation between the last job and the next job. Only later did I come to realize that the scariest part of unemployment is never the lack of a salary, but that you suddenly lose a reason to go out every day. In the first week, I got up at 8:00 every day; in the second week, 9:00; in the third week, 10:00. Later, one day I woke up and glanced at my phone—it was already 11:47. The house was very quiet; my wife had gone to work, my kid had gone to school, someone downstairs was doing renovations, and the electric drill throbbed again and again through the wall. Lying in bed, I suddenly didn't know what I was getting up for. I used to think going to work was exhausting—commuting over an hour every day, endless meetings, endless messages to reply to. But only after truly not having to go to work did I understand for the first time that what breaks a person most easily is not being busy, but that nobody needs you.
I started sending out resumes. At first, I was quite picky—I wouldn't look at anything paying less than 20,000 yuan, wouldn't consider jobs with only a one-day weekend, skipped anything too far away, and ignored small companies. A month later, I started looking at jobs offering 15,000 yuan. Two months later, 12,000 yuan was fine too. Three months later, on recruitment apps, as long as someone took the initiative to say hello to me, I would click in and read carefully. In the past, when headhunters called me, I sometimes found it annoying. Later, whenever an unfamiliar number rang, I would pick it up instantly, saying "Hello, sir/ma'am," with a much more polite tone than before. Once, the interviewer asked for my age, and I said thirty-eight. There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone, and then they said, "Okay, I'll pass your information along to the business department." I knew right then there would be no follow-up. Later, I noticed something very interesting on recruitment apps: many job postings specified "over three years of work experience," but what they actually wanted was three years of experience, the body of a 25-year-old, the maturity of a 30-year-old, the capability of a 35-year-old, and ideally, a willingness to accept a 22-year-old's salary. As for someone like me, it's very awkward—too much experience means you're expensive, being older means you're hard to manage, and having a family means you can't work overtime every day. If you aim for a high position, they think you won't stay long in lower ones; if you aim for a low position, you have to swallow your own pride first.
The hardest part of job hunting in middle age isn't that you don't know how to do the work; it's that you have to prove that although you're old, you're not yet so expensive that you're not worth hiring. In the fourth month of unemployment, I went to an interview behind my wife's back for the first time. Why hide it? Because every time I went out before, she would ask how it went, and when I came back, I had to say it was fine and I was waiting for news. Of course, the news never came. Saying it too many times made me feel ashamed, so I stopped talking about it. Wearing the most expensive suit I used to wear to work, I took a an hour-and-a-half subway ride to interview at a startup. The boss was seven years younger than me. Flipping through my resume, he asked, "You used to manage a team of over ten people, but this role is just ordinary execution. Can you accept that?" I said I could. "The salary is only half of what you used to make, can you accept that too?" I said yes. He looked at me for a moment and asked, "Then what are you after?" I was speechlessly stuck for a moment. Actually, the answer was very simple: I was after a job. But the simplest truth is often the hardest thing for an adult to say out loud. In the end, that company didn't hire me either.
On my way back, I bought two steamed buns at the subway station for a total of six yuan, standing next to a trash can to eat them. I suddenly remembered when I was still working, I used to complain that seventy or eighty yuan lunch sets didn't taste good. That day, I ate those six-yuan buns extremely slowly, because I had already started counting every penny. The monthly mortgage was 6,800 yuan, child tutoring classes were over 10,000 yuan a year, plus property management fees, insurance, parking fees, electricity, water, and gas. In the past, I didn't know how much a household actually cost a year because my salary came in every month. Only after losing my job did I realize the most ruthless thing about a family ledger: you can have zero income, but life will never pause its deductions.
In the fifth month, I sold my car. I told my wife we weren't driving it anyway, but the truth was that the insurance was about to expire. On the day I sold the car, I sat in the passenger seat watching the buyer test-drive it. That car was bought in the second year after my son was born, and I had driven it for eight years. There was a scratch on the left side of the steering wheel, left by my keys one time when I got into the car holding my child. I used to think it was just a beat-up car, but when I actually sold it and stood by the roadside watching it drive away, I felt terrible inside. Only later did I realize that what I couldn't part with wasn't the car, but the self who could still afford to buy a car. Half a year later, I finally found a job. The salary was 40 percent lower than before, and the position was two levels lower. I didn't tell my former colleagues, nor did I post on my WeChat Moments anymore. In the past, when we had company dinners, industry forums, or stayed at hotels on business trips, I would occasionally post a few photos. After losing my job, I became less and less willing to let others know what I was doing, because adults have a very strange kind of dignity. When you're doing well, you wish everyone could see it; when you're doing poorly, you just want to hide yourself away.
I worked that job for eight months before the company went under. The second time I lost my job, I wasn't as shocked as the first time—I was even a bit calm. When I packed up my things, I only took my own cup. During my first unemployment, I had packed away a large box of things—trophies, notebooks, souvenirs, work badges—only to find out later that none of them were of any use. Once the company doesn't want you, those things only serve as proof that you once belonged to a place. After the second job loss, I delivered food, drove for others, and picked up some freelance gig projects. At first, I was always afraid of running into people I knew. Once, I actually ran into a former subordinate from my previous company. I was holding a food delivery bag, and he was walking out of an office building. We both froze for a second. He asked, "Bro, you're now..." I quickly interrupted, "Just helping out a friend to get the experience." He said, "Oh, oh, that's great." We both knew I was lying, but he didn't call me out. The final dignity of adults is sometimes knowing that you're not doing well, but pretending not to notice.
That day, after finishing the last delivery, sitting on my electric scooter, I suddenly broke into tears. It wasn't because delivering food was humiliating. Looking back now, I actually feel that I was quite normal at that time; earning money through hard work is nothing to be ashamed of. What really pained me was that it took me a long time to accept that the identity I used to be so proud of wasn't as solid as I had imagined. The title wasn't mine, the office wasn't mine, the clients weren't mine, the company email wasn't mine, and even the person whom people addressed as "Manager" every day wasn't entirely me. All I truly possessed was my age, my body, and the numbers in my bank account that kept dropping bit by bit.
When I was forty-five, my son started high school. One day he asked me, Dad, what did you actually do before? I stared blankly for a long time, suddenly realizing that the years he remembered most clearly were precisely the most battered and miserable years of my life. In his memory, I was often at home, frequently changing jobs, and constantly talking about how bad the market conditions were. But in my own memory, I too had once worn a shirt to work every day, pounded the table in meeting rooms, and had people waiting for my signature.
A person's life is strange; the identity you spend twenty years desperately building can be forgotten by no one in just two or three years.
After turning fifty, I completely stopped looking for so-called formal jobs. I became a consultant for small companies, helped friends run projects, took on whatever work was available, and stayed home when there was none. My income was unstable, but instead of panicking, I felt calmer because I finally understood one thing: so-called unemployment is not a sudden derailment of life; the real problem is that our generation has been educated from childhood to believe there is only one track—studying, graduating, getting a promotion, buying a house, raising children, and retiring. We always think that as long as every step is taken correctly, life will be safe. But reality is not a railway; reality is more like a river. Companies will close, industries will vanish, technology will update, bodies will deteriorate, children will grow up, and parents will age. You don't even need to do anything wrong for life to still push you to somewhere else.
By the time I was sixty, very few people asked me what I used to do anymore. The neighbors in the residential complex only knew me as Old Zhang, who went grocery shopping every morning, picked up his grandson in the afternoon, and occasionally played chess with a few old men. I finally stopped proactively explaining that I actually used to do quite well when I was young, because no one cares. Actually, this came as a relief. When people live to the end, they realize that many of the things they desperately tried to maintain when they were young are not that important. Positions will vanish, companies will disappear, the contacts in your phone book will vanish, and even your proudest resume will eventually just be an unopened Word document on a computer.
But this is not the most depressing part I want to tell you. The most depressing part is that it took me a very long time in my life to learn to separate who I am from what I do. When I was young, if someone asked me who I was, I would say which company I belonged to, what my position was, and what business I was in. After becoming unemployed, I suddenly didn't know how to introduce myself. Because work had been taken away, I found that I seemed to have nothing left. Later I understood that this is why many people are truly afraid of unemployment. It's not the fear of poverty; it's the fear that without a job, even you yourself wouldn't know how to prove that you ever existed.
So if you are currently unemployed, I won't tell you that everything will be fine, because not necessarily—the next job might be worse, the salary might drop, the industry might really never recover, and your former position might be gone forever. The greatest cruelty of adulthood is that many losses never return the same way. But I can tell you another thing: the first thing after becoming unemployed is not to rush to prove your worth, but to hold your ground, calculate your cash flow, cut unnecessary fixed expenses, and stop maintaining your previous consumption just for the sake of saving face. Keep paying your social security if you can without interruption, don't let your body collapse, and don't let your daily routine completely fall apart. You must arrange some specific tasks for yourself every day, even if it's just walking five kilometers outside, sending out three resumes, or studying for an hour. Because what unemployment destroys first is usually not your bank card, but your sense of time. Once a person doesn't know what day of the week it is, nor why they are getting up tomorrow, they will quickly begin to doubt themselves.
The second thing is not to pin all your hopes on returning to your original rank. After a certain age, the most important ability is not necessarily continuing to climb upward, but repricing yourself. What other skills can you sell? Which experiences can be broken down to make money independently? Is there a low-cost secondary source of income? Can past connections be reconnected? What you need is not necessarily a job identical to the past; what you truly need is to find a position again that allows life to keep running. I used to think that a person's life should be an upward line, with higher and higher salaries, higher and higher positions, and larger and larger houses. Later I found out that most people's lives are not like that; they go up, they go down, they break, they take detours, and for a very long time, nothing happens at all. But that is also life.
If I must draw a conclusion from a lifetime of unemployment experiences, I would say that work is important, money is important, and social identity is also important. Don't listen to those breezy words claiming that a job is just a job. For ordinary people, work is part of dignity, part of family security, and part of standing firm in society. So it is normal to feel sad when losing it, but you must also slowly learn that a job can define you for a while, but it cannot define you for a lifetime. Because companies will have the day they don't want you, industries will have the day they eliminate you, and age will have the day it catches up to you. But as long as you are still alive, you must learn to rediscover yourself—the person whose name is not written on any work badge—after all those titles fall away.
The most respectable moment of my life was not when I was a manager, nor when I earned the highest salary, but rather one winter after I delivered my last food order and rode my bike home. My hands were numb from the cold, and I had made a little over two hundred yuan that day. My wife had left a bowl of noodles for me, and our son was already asleep. I sat in the kitchen and finished that bowl of noodles. No title, no company, nobody calling me boss. Yet that night, for the first time, I thought: forget it, I managed to hold this family together today, and tomorrow's problems can wait until tomorrow.
I hope friends can leave a comment sharing a middle-aged unemployment experience, whether it is your own or someone around you. I believe there must be a lot of them, and I don't think anyone would doubt this point. Even if it hasn't happened to you or someone around you, just like the employment rate of newly graduated college students, the Chinese Communist Party hides it and doesn't dare show it to you, which proves that the news has already become exceptionally terrible. Because if they could fake it, they would show it to you; if they could fake it, they would show it to you. So I think there is no need to question this anymore. But I believe individual experiences make cold data more vivid. Therefore, I still hope friends can feel free to share vivid personal experiences, thank you.
Well, that is all for this episode. If you want to support me, please join the member channel. And I especially hope to chat with everyone in real time during member live streams. So that's all for this episode, see you next time.