Some Thoughts on the Newer Generation

Some Thoughts on the Newer Generation Recently I've had the fortune of getting close enough to hear the thoughts of friends from a generation younger than ours. Some of what I found was expected, and some was not. What was expected is that, for peers within roughly +-5 years of age, family influence on career choices is still very significant. But the influence has led more to confusion, mainly because the macro environment keeps changing while parents keep extrapolating from their own experiences. Family differences, at least within the same bracket, can't be simply attributed to resource endowments ("you eat what the mountain gives") or SES ("no nobles from humble families") in terms of the specific pathways of influence. I think a more reasonable framework is marketized vs. non-marketized (government institutions, academia, etc.) and generalist vs. specialist. The 60s-70s generation families thrived on the era's dividends in an expanding economy — it was an era where marketized generalists (and a few non-marketized ones) won decisively. The reason is simple: in an economy growing over 10% annually, if income grows linearly (sometimes not even that), then the exponential excess over linear growth each year is simply being left on the table. The recipe for success for the 60s-70s generation marketized generalists was generally information + resources. For instance, in the 1990s, anything advertised on CCTV could sell, and the fact that the ROI was 10x was a secret. Among those who knew the secret, anyone who could scrape together the ad money could succeed — like Shi Yuzhu who promoted Melatonin (Nao Bai Jin). Conversations with parents often feel like shadow boxing with air, because they've already become apex predators in their little ecological niches. Competitors have died through many rounds of mass extinction, and new entrants simply cannot compete with them. So like primordial species on a Pacific island, they don't need to consider whether mammals have already evolved elsewhere in the world. The so-called "mammals" are actually the professionals (lawyers, accountants, consultants) and big tech engineers who grew up in the post-2008 context of demand shifting from exports to investment. These filled the previously vacant position of marketized specialists, with an income structure of high starting points plus linear growth, supplemented by sharing in exponential growth through equity incentives. In every generation's impression, specialists have always occupied the upstream position of "only the learned are elevated." The only difference is that in good times, the marketized portion is more popular. But it's precisely those generalist parents, sometimes even anti-intellectual ones, who put the specialist path on a pedestal while giving advice drawn from their own success as generalists. I have no authority to speak about conditions in China, but for the current US environment, especially regarding the American right wing's receptiveness to immigrants, specialists absolutely dominate. It's worth noting, however, that those under the greatest pressure from AI replacement are also the Chinese-education-style specialists. I think what specialists optimize relative to generalists is absolute ability, while what marketized optimizes relative to non-marketized is being the last one standing — the logic is actually quite similar to comparative advantage in economics. The specialist mindset is how to become number one in a niche subdivision, but the risk is environmental change. The generalist mindset is how to find a niche where you can be the least bad in the ecological niche. This also explains why Silicon Valley AI researchers have absolutely no loyalty — in a field that is highly specialized yet where the technology may be completely overhauled in 3 years, why not earn a bundle and retire directly? In the AI environment, the opportunity for specialists lies in structuring, productizing, and scaling their skills, but the challenge is that entrepreneurship itself requires generalist abilities — you don't need to be an expert in everything, but you can't have obvious weaknesses — so the challenge is transitioning toward being a generalist. For generalists, the consideration is how to leverage mobility for cross-domain integration to create asymmetric advantages, like the ancient Chinese horse-racing strategy of mismatching strengths against weaknesses. What was unexpected is that I don't usually engage in typology of people, but when I tried to classify people using the commonly used pseudo-science of MBTI, reading preferences, and educational environment, I found the predictive power was actually not much better than fortune telling or palm reading. The biggest problem with MBTI is that the binary is too absolute — it compresses a dynamic person who floats within a range depending on context directly into a static binary variable. I think its greater function is actually summarizing people's common perceptions of introvert/extrovert, feeling/thinking, planning/spontaneous into one framework — the human brain naturally gravitates toward this kind of binary categorization. Two differences were quite notable. First, self-seeking has become a kind of fashion, but its meaning is likely different for each person. We've heard of Qu Yuan's melancholy, but we've never heard of Qu Yuan needing to seek himself, because in ancient times, the self's position was predetermined by family, hierarchy, and the ruler-subject relationship — there was no identity anxiety. Self-seeking is itself a very 19th-20th century behavior; precisely because people have more choices, questions like "to be or not to be" and "who am I in the tide of the times" arise. But this classical self-seeking — having choices doesn't mean having no structure — still ultimately faces questions of idealism vs. realism, spirit vs. flesh, conforming or enduring. What I've found, however, is that self-seeking has now largely become a completely de-structured, feeling-first pursuit of finding one's comfortable state. I think part of it is related to no longer believing in grand narratives, and another part is actually similar to the logic of internet products — an article or social media account isn't really defined by genre, role, or the positions and ideas it advocates anymore; it's actually more of a reinforcement-learning-algorithm-style feedback-first logic. The other is that de-responsibilization is very evident. It's actually connected to the first point — the role of the individual as a subject of expression, behavior, and risk-bearing in traditional public society is gradually dissolving into a narrative subject that prioritizes feelings, consumption, and experience. Slogans like "only happiness, no worries" carry quite a bit of rallying power.