I believe that many people who want to immigrate have heard this view: the rich are nourished wherever they are, and the people at the bottom go out, as long as they work hard and live well, the worst is the middle class, a lot of age, social class and life after going out The level has to be downgraded, it is better to stay and nourish.
In addition, many people may have heard such remarks as "go out to be a second-class citizen and be a dog for xx". Of course, these words are not worth refuting. Anyone who has lived overseas knows what's going on. But compared with the completely nonsense view of the "second-class citizen" theory, the "de-escalation theory" is really something that many people are worried about and are willing to believe.
Regarding this matter, I also had some thoughts before going out. Combined with some experiences after I came out, I can share some of my own thoughts.
First, when we worry about "downgrades," what are we essentially worrying about? Worry about less happiness, right? How can a person's happiness be measured? Although it is a relatively abstract thing, there are still traces to follow. In my own conclusion, for most people, there may be two main factors that affect happiness: one is vertical comparison, the possession of resources in an absolute sense; The second is the horizontal comparison, which is the sequence of your status in the crowd in a relative sense; the third is the degree of stability of future expectations.
The following analysis one by one.
one,
It is very simple, it is the absolute amount of material and spiritual resources that you can obtain. Among them, the former cannot be simply replaced by currency, because there are price differences in different places. For example, if you earn 20,000 per month in Beijing, the probability is not as good as that in third-tier cities. If you want to compare material resources, you have to consider the price issue. We assume that you are in a third-tier city, a family of three living in a two-bedroom apartment at 120 in the center of the city, and you eat beef twice a week, and other meat, eggs, and milk are optional. , drive a car of about 200,000 yuan, you can occasionally go shopping for clothes and cosmetics, and most of them are purchased online - we assume that this standard of living, a monthly income of 10,000 can support, then the same standard of living, in Beijing you have to At least 40,000 monthly income.
But even so, with the same material resources, we may still think that the quality of life in Beijing is higher than that in third-tier cities—for example, in the years I was in Beijing, the standard of living might be the same as that of a university teacher in my hometown. The living standards of the classmates are similar, and their houses are even bigger, but if you ask me if I would like to exchange with them, I will definitely not, not to mention the connections and social relations (in fact, their connections in their hometown may be Even better, if there is something, just make a phone call), but something other than pure material, such as spiritual resources.
It might be a bit abstract to say that, so let me give you an example.
One day in February 2018, my wife and I went to a community theater in an urban village in Chaoyang District and watched a play reflecting the life of migrant workers. An unfamiliar friend, a talented girl who graduated from Chinese opera. It was minus 5 degrees that day, and there was no heating in the small theater. The audience was covered with torn quilts prepared by the props team and shivered. In the question-and-answer session after the play, I asked this question, and the director's answer was that we hope Everyone can put themselves in their shoes and experience the daily life of the actors on the stage.
On the same day, my classmate from my hometown, thousands of miles away, posted a photo of clocking in the bathing center and played mahjong all night in the middle of the night.
To a certain extent, this is also the main reason why I can't go back to my hometown, or I don't feel happy when I go back.
I don't know how you feel, but for me, the days of the New Year are actually very tormenting: I go back year after year as usual, then attend class reunions as usual, eat and drink ktv as usual, and then go back to school as usual. It is customary to chat awkwardly with old classmates who may only meet once in a few years and are almost strangers about childhood things... And in the end, there must be a group of people looking for the lady, and a group of people playing mahjong all night, and I can only Call a chauffeur alone and go home.
Maybe for many people, this matter is not important and does not affect their happiness, but I believe that there must be some people who think that this matter is too damn important!
People, when you live to a certain age, there will inevitably be a group of people around you who are similar to you, chatting about things that you are all interested in, but in different places, these people and things are different, and this is also part of happiness.
Second, your status sequence in the social group.
For example, the second-generation official friend I wrote about in the previous article was very entangled about going abroad and wanted to leave, but he was always worried about the decline of social class. I told him honestly, for you, it is inevitable that your social class will decline after you go out - you are considered a superior person in China, at least one thousandth of the first one. Phone, but after going out, there is a high probability that you will only be an ordinary person. Even if you have a lot of assets, you will take all of them out. You also live in a Chinese-inhabited area such as Richmond, and your life is convenient enough, but that kind of phone calls to the doctor. It is absolutely impossible for your family to see a doctor, even Little Potato can't do it.
He then said, that feeling is still nourishing in the country, and it is not unbalanced, and the sense of happiness is compared. I said, what you said has a certain truth. In addition to the abundance of absolute resources, happiness does have a comparative level. The problem is that your comparison method above is actually relatively one-sided.
Then I gave him an example. Suppose there are two opportunities now. One is to let you return to Zhu Yuanzhang to be a high-ranking official, and the other is to let you go to Canada to be an ordinary person and open a small supermarket. Which one would you choose? He thought about it carefully and said, the latter, the former is too risky. I said, look, you know how to choose, right?
In the Ming Dynasty, although you may be below one person and above ten thousand people, and your ranking in the crowd is high, it is a society where people are extremely unequal. You may be able to look down on many people, but in the In the eyes of people with a higher status than you, you are still an ant. Your life and death are in the hands of others. When you meet, you have to kneel and lick; and in this society that pays great attention to equality, even if the social status of the other party is very important. Sequence is much taller than you, but your personalities are equal, and he has no right to deprive you of any rights, because there are legal guarantees, even if you are the prime minister, you don't have to nod to him, pour tea and water, and do some Disgusting things to yourself. This is why even many people in the pyramid still aspire to live in a more egalitarian society.
The third is whether the expectations for the future are stable.
If you are a businessman, or overweight stocks, and there are two businesses for you to choose, how would you choose?
First, the profit margin may be 100%, but the risk is very high, you may suddenly go bankrupt and owe a large amount of debt, and this risk is completely beyond your control; the second, the profit margin is 15%, but very stable , the risk is controllable, and the worst is not making money.
Believe me, the vast majority of business people will choose the latter. Don't believe the bullshit that "the profit margin is 300% and you dare to risk the gallows", that's not a capitalist, it's a desperate man like a drug dealer. The reason why scoundrels dare to take risks is because they are barefooted and not afraid to wear shoes. This is precisely the way of thinking of rogue proletarians, and capitalists will not risk their lives with you.
Similarly, for the middle class, what they are most afraid of is not that their income is not high enough and wages are not rising fast enough, but that there is no stable expectation and the risk is too high.
If your income is expected to be stable, whether it is 10,000 or 50,000, you know how to arrange your expenses, how much house to live in, how much mortgage to pay, and what car to buy. But if you wake up tomorrow, the company suddenly goes bankrupt, the mother suddenly needs 1 million surgical fees, and the savings in the bank disappear, how should you arrange your life?
After reading the above three points, do you, who consider yourself middle-class, still feel that going out is just a simple "downgrade"?
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In terms of absolute resources, many people think that "I earn 300,000-500,000 a year in China, and if I change careers, most of them won't get this income", and the prices there are high, and the standard of living will definitely decline. In fact, there is a problem with this algorithm. .
Because, when you consider living standards, you can’t just consider daily consumption such as food, drink and entertainment (most of which are cheap domestically), but also the biggest items: housing, education, and medical care.
With North America, you can probably live in a single-family house with a double garage and a swimming pool of more than 2,000 feet (a place like Vancouver and Toronto may be difficult, but as long as you have a stable job, it is not completely impossible), park a 20 in the backyard A small yacht of 2 feet is usually used to drive a pickup to go out to swim in lakes and rivers. Every year, the whole family goes abroad once and two or three domestic trips are the basic configuration. The cities you will go to, and the people you will come into contact with, most likely will not only know how to follow The group where you talk about bathing and mahjong, most of the places you can see are dramas, concerts, museums, fitness, outdoor hiking, and a variety of rich cultural activities. In addition to various sports, there may be other activities in the community activity center. library.
But if you are in China, how do you live such a life? Assuming that you are a middle-class person with an annual income of 500,000, then you have a high probability of living in a first- and second-tier city. Can the above life be supported by 500,000?
Maquanying outside the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, Guantang has a house like the one above for more than 50 million. There is no independent garage, and there is no lawn in the yard. If you still want to have enough time to travel with your family, your assets should be at least a few dozen 100 million, the company is listed and on the right track, and you don't have to do everything yourself.
Even in second-tier cities, such as Hangzhou or Wuhan, you can benchmark against second-tier Canadians like Calgary. A single-family house here is 600,000-700,000 Canadian dollars. For the same money, you can buy the same size, quality and surrounding green facilities in Hangzhou. Similar house?
Of course, if you insist that I do a small business, I usually live in the county seat, and the house here is cheap, so it’s not impossible, but your public and recreational facilities are probably not comparable to that of a small city with 30,000 people in Canada.
In addition to housing, there is education, depending on your expectations.
Suppose you plan to let your children go to the public school, then there may not be any tuition fees in the country (the supplementary tuition fee is another matter, if you plan to let your children take the exam, you may have to spend money everywhere, but the domestic atmosphere makes you more likely to take the exam. That’s it), but you’re going to pay a lot more to get into this public school—in Canada, you can choose the best school district, you can rent a house, and even if you buy a house, the price isn’t much higher than in a non-school district More, 50% more expensive, and in China, school district housing is often four or five times more expensive than non-school districts. My brother bought a degree room with a unit price of more than 60,000 in order to send his children to the provincial key. You must know that the surrounding ordinary non-school districts only In the early 10,000s.
In addition to the school district, you have to have a hukou (if you are in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc., this is a big problem), but for this hukou, your career choice will be much narrower. Taking Beijing, which I know well, as an example, if you are an employee of a private company or a foreign company, or if you are doing business by yourself or working as a freelancer, as a foreigner, you will most likely not be able to obtain a hukou. The business owner can pay taxes, but the threshold If it is too high, you can easily invest in immigration with that amount of money. To get this account, you must either enter the system or spend at least more than 1 million yuan to buy a place. There is still a certain risk. The problem is, if you enter the system, as a newcomer, your salary will definitely not be enough to buy a house - a junior brother of my wife, in order to get a household registration, he graduated with a master's degree in 985 and went to Huangcun Primary School to be a teacher with a monthly salary of 6k. Private companies or foreign companies, there is no problem with getting an annual salary of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan for a few years.
This has formed a paradox. If you want a household registration, you will not have a house, and if you want a house, you will not have a household registration. It is very difficult to balance the two.
In any city in North America, this is not a problem. Take my city as an example. There are 1300 two-bedrooms in the non-school district and 1600 in the school district. As long as you live here, don’t say you don’t have a citizenship, you are an international student. , the children are also charged, all the treatment is exactly the same, fill out a form and get it in ten minutes, there is no loan or sponsorship fee, and there is no need to ask grandpa to tell grandma to give gifts to the teacher, and other children will not discriminate against your baby, saying he is " foreign population".
If you say, I still want to roll some points, go to the private sector, okay.
When I lived in Beijing, there were three private kindergartens downstairs in my house. The cheapest one was 12,000 a month, while the public one was cheaper at more than 2,000. The problem was that we couldn’t rank. In contrast, on the Canadian side, taking the most expensive Vancouver and Toronto as an example, preschools aged 3-5 cost about 900-1000 per month. After the Ontario reform in 2022, daycare is expected to drop to less than 10 yuan a day. , that is, as long as more than 200 per month, converted into RMB, it is cheaper than the domestic public.
The gap between primary schools and above is even bigger—private secondary schools in Toronto and Vancouver generally cost 13,000-20,000 Canadian dollars a year, and you can look at private schools in Beijing and Tianjin.
Not to mention that there are many private schools in Canada that have the advantage of being bilingual in English and French.
The medical part will be discussed in the third part, so I won't go into details here.
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In terms of horizontal comparison, for all those who claim to be middle-class, you can recall that when you were working, did you ever encounter oppression and disrespect from people with higher status? Maybe you are the glamorous director and vice president of xx in the eyes of others, and you can command Xiaobai who has just come to the company, but when you face the secretary of the xx committee and the director of the office of xx, do you have to show a flattering smile? When you go to visit the leader of xx, do you have to keep a few piles of cash in the trunk, and the last time you have to have a dozen iPhones in case you need it?
Isn't your rich, high-class life most of the time earned by this kind of anxious, disgusting, and careful life?
When you arrive in Canada, do you still need to applaud two or three young models to the leaders in advance, and bring a small blue pill with you?
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Finally, it's about "stabilizing expectations".
We often say that people in North America don’t have much savings. Even if they live in a big house on the surface, in fact, they may not be able to get thousands of dollars in card. This is true, but the reason is that they Future life has super stable expectations.
For example, the apartment I am renting now is more than 1,000 square feet, and the monthly rent is 1,400. When I signed the contract, I found that it was paid monthly (I have seen more than a dozen houses before and after, and they are all paid monthly), and the deposit is only 300 Dollars - this is unimaginable in China. Depositing one and paying three is the most basic, and half-yearly payment is also quite a lot. When I first came, some landlords asked for a guarantee (because I just came and didn't have a job or credit points), I said I could pay for half a year at a time, but the other party refused and insisted on monthly payment.
Later, I talked about this with relatives here, and then I understood their logic, that is, they care more about your stable credit than taking a few more months of rent in advance, because of the relatively complete welfare.
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