When a System of Evaluation Becomes the World

Returning to the village, what I felt was not simply slowness but time almost held in place. Older people lived by experience accumulated over years; children repeated similar routines in summer care classes; some young people still carried postures that had been familiar more than a decade ago. Life had changed, of course, but not enough to unsettle its basic order of judgment. What counts as respectable, promising, or acceptable was already written, more or less, in the lives around them.

It is easy to call this backwardness. Yet staying nearby, doing wage work, building a family, or accepting a stable and limited life are not choices that an outside gaze should dismiss lightly. The question is not a particular way of life. It is the moment when it stops being a choice and becomes a common sense no longer examined. No one has to be explicitly forbidden from going elsewhere to find it difficult; living within one field of experience for long enough can make its possibilities appear to be all possibilities.

The size of a person’s world is not decided by the amount of information available. Things one has heard about do not become real points of reference until they enter a life that can be felt. The way a child sees adults work, handle failure, and receive respect shapes desire earlier than abstract advice does. Practices that look rough, dated, or even ridiculous from outside can still serve real functions locally: they offer belonging, status, and a sense of adulthood that can be confirmed without waiting too long. Calling this ignorance merely substitutes a conclusion for understanding.

I once lived inside that kind of experience too. Internet cafés, skipping class, and what was called “mixing with society” did not present themselves as mistakes; they were among the few things that could bring immediate recognition from peers. Later, boarding school, keeping a diary, and a teacher willing to respond seriously to a student’s words made that unquestioned life appear questionable for the first time. The point is not that effort changes destiny. It is that people sometimes need an outside gaze, and an expression treated seriously, to discover that they have been answering a question they never asked themselves.

That does not justify the simple conclusion that one must “go out.” Leaving an original environment does not automatically mean freedom. A person may leave the village for a larger city, a higher educational system, or a faster industry, then accept another set of measures just as unreflectively. Degrees, résumés, income, fluency with tools, and the speed of updating oneself form a more elaborate web of value. One enclosure is broken; another need not disappear.

What is distinctive about the technological age is not that it requires everyone to master one tool immediately. It is that it makes falling behind a continuously felt threat. New abilities keep appearing, old abilities keep losing value, and planning and preparation acquire almost moral weight. Life can become an unfinished proof: rest must improve recovery, interests should become abilities, and abilities should become qualifications for the next step. Even while pausing, one calculates the cost of the pause.

This gives the village’s stability and the technological world’s acceleration a hidden symmetry. The former supplies answers so certain that one need not ask further; the latter supplies questions so constantly renewed that one cannot stay still. In both, a life can lose itself: either it is prescribed in advance by inherited experience, or it is continually requisitioned by future demands. In one case possibilities seem too few; in the other they are so numerous that no choice can settle into peace.

This is why “constant progress” is more ambiguous than it sounds. Progress itself is not the problem. What matters is whether action comes from commitment to a way of life or fear of falling behind; whether plans help one reach reality or exhaust reality in advance; whether a larger world expands judgment or merely expands comparison.

The village has not remained in the past, and the technological world has not arrived in the future. Both are living orders at work in particular settings. The difficult task is not to mistake either order for nature itself. We may not be able to leave every environment, nor need we flee every inherited answer. But we should retain the ability to turn back, at some point, and ask where the desires, anxieties, and judgments now governing us came from.

Author: Zhang Yicong · Original