Three years, and then another three. It feels like what just ended isn't the gaokao, but my youth slipping away. Looking back deeply on all these years of studying and living, I realize that for nearly six years, I've been endlessly hoping for a bright and beautiful future—one that isn't just about impressive scores, but also includes a more aspirational life, stronger friendships, and the kind of romance you see in TV anime. The reality, though, is that none of those three things came true, even though I don't think the problem is entirely on my end.
Growing up in Shenzhen, students get used to binge-reading web novels and scrolling through short videos from a young age. This feeds them a distorted view of life, love, and even values. Girls would rather trust what they see on that app with the red background and white text than feel the real world with their hearts. Boys prefer gaming, talking about gaming, or recycling stale internet memes—things I thought only showed up in elementary school kids who got online way too early.
This leads to an obvious problem: their true selves get fooled by online content. All that fake maturity, fake cross-individual-connection, and fake understanding of the world have twisted the hearts of today's young people. I won't deny that this can be one way people engage with the world, but it builds a wall between their online interactions and real-life ones. The gap between groups keeps widening—outsiders can't get in, and insiders won't let them, willingly trapping themselves in an information—no, wait, a cognitive cocoon. An information cocoon is built externally; a cognitive cocoon is more self-imposed, a new kind of cocoon formed by refusing to change how you see the world.
At the same time, this kind of disconnect tends to happen more among the girls. They often have this rigid sense of social hierarchy that's hard for us to grasp. Take the girls in my class, for example. From what I can tell, the factional complexity there is no less convoluted than the dynastic successions of the Three Kingdoms, Two Jins, and Northern and Southern Dynasties. At least the latter had patterns and causes you could trace. The former has almost none, and it can shift on a dime—one person's wish not being granted in the moment, a friendship suddenly breaking, even a slip of the tongue can shatter that fragile peace (or balance) intermittently or completely... I still can't fully understand it to this day. But I do know that while I may not fully get them, I do understand that it's 2026 (if you don't get it, just download Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu, set your age under 18, pick female as your gender, and you'll see). Also, their access to information is unbelievable—and here, "information" is a bad word. Maybe it has a lot to do with being in a liberal arts class. Whatever, I'll stop here. It's not like many people will read my essay anyway. If you're willing to listen, feel free to leave a comment below... and remember to set it to private.
From the guys' perspective, the boys in my class are unusually united (compared to other classes, there's no factionalism among us; even if one or two think differently from the majority, we manage to be inclusive). Still, I can't seem to build deep connections with them, even though I crave their approval and want the chance to help them. But they don't seem to like that. It makes me feel like a lone, special existence they can't understand. I think this is partly my own problem—since it's hard to find common topics with them, and on top of that, there were some weird rumors at the start of the semester that gave the girls in my class a strange, unfounded impression of me (probably because some mischievous troublemakers in my old class deliberately trashed my reputation, and some of them were close with a girl who later transferred into my class, and they were regulars on that red-and-blue app, and the girl who spread the rumors about me happened to share a dorm with her—rmmmm, this bizarre combination, after undergoing some strange alchemical reaction like spaghetti mixed with No. 72 concrete, brewed up an interpersonal Berlin Wall of extremely complex origins). This meant that even by graduation, I could never find a balanced footing in class interactions. So I had no choice but to lower myself in how I dealt with classmates, and to keep good relations with the teachers...
If you thought that was it, sorry, there's more.
Because a lot of people in my class didn't really approve of our homeroom teacher's management—even though she admittedly didn't do a great job later on (she kept doing administrative work, showed up late to class, and taught at a snail's pace)—I became what some people called an "ai*TV" (I still don't know what that means to this day), which further widened the distance between me and the rest of the class.
Speaking of which, I find some students really strange. In their words, our school's food is bad, the teachers are bad, and the campus environment is bad. But I've never felt that way. Because I think a cafeteria is a cafeteria, not a restaurant, and besides, the food isn't bad. Some people say the cafeteria doesn't listen to feedback, but once I suggested that the greens should never have chili in them, and after that, I never saw chili in the greens again. As for the teachers and environment being bad, that's even more nonsense. Basically all our teachers are among the school's best, and since it's a new school, the greenery is nice, and the dorms are four-person rooms with beds over desks. It's hard to imagine how many other schools could be better than ours. I don't get it—can't people in 2026 even manage to be content with what they have? Once, I posted our senior year's last-week class schedule on Bilibili, and a lot of people said our school's routine was like heaven. I can clearly tell that most schools in the mainland aren't like this; many are still stuck on brutal schedules like two days off a month or one day off every thirteen days. So I really do appreciate schools in Guangdong.
So, whether it's others toward me or me toward others, there seems to be this mutual incomprehension. Even though I long to connect with them, it rarely ends well. I'm deeply unsatisfied with my interpersonal relationships over these three years. I really hope things can improve in the future.
I'll stop here for now. This essay was written in bits and pieces, so it barely holds together. Still, thank you for reading this far.
Thanks.
Best wishes.