Have You Caught Any of This Year's Fashionable Ailments? | QDaily Research Lab's Year-End Study of Humans

Come to think of it, what self-indulgent nonsense is all this?

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Live too far out of step with your times and you easily end up a weirdo (though if you happen to be good-looking, you might become a beloved "old cadre" type adored by fangirls). Embrace your times too hard, and you may catch all manner of modern diseases.

Modern diseases come in two kinds. One is physical: staring at screens big and small until you go blind, get fat, go bald, and your cervical spine is about to snap. The other is psychological, a form of mental anxiety: procrastination, social phobia, the inability to find inner peace without coloring in Secret Garden, and so on. This second kind has more and more branches and more and more patients, but its roots come down to three:

• Anxiety about time that seems to rush away from you alone: "The thing I ordered three days ago still hasn't arrived. I may never live to see my package. I'm going to cry";
• Anxiety about information that comes at you like a flood: "Everyone keeps saying 'it's all about the aura' and 'why don't you just fly up to heaven,' what do they even mean, I actually don't get it, I'm going to cry";
• And anxiety about yourself, spinning in that flood of information: "Is Monkey King: Hero Is Back actually good? If I don't check the Douban score and my Douban friends' short reviews, I don't even know what to think. I'm going to cry."

The internet makes it easier for us to embrace the whole world, but if your own arms aren't wide enough, the embrace can turn into drowning. Whenever you can't find a meaning to your existence, whenever you feel lost in the dark, a modern disease may be flaring up.

As a paragon of contemporary humanitarianism, QDaily Research Lab has compiled the cases observed this year into a handbook for identifying fashionable modern diseases. Match your symptoms and take your seat. There is bound to be one that fits you:

1. Fear of Missing Out

Known in English as FOMO, Fear of Missing Out: a condition in which a person cannot bear to miss any information on social networks that might concern themselves or the latest trends, and becomes anxious if they do.

An attack usually brings a feeling of being left out: "The fun belongs to them, and I have nothing." To avoid that feeling, FOMO sufferers have no choice but to refresh their social feeds non-stop.

According to an earlier Lab survey, "Modern Diseases: Do You Have FOMO Too?", a quarter of people, when they scroll through Moments every morning, must keep going until they reach the last post they saw the night before. They expand every long post, play every song someone shared, and like every photo. If they skip a single day, they feel unwell in body and mind, though they aren't actually sure what they missed. 17.1% fear someone might be trying to reach them the moment they put their phone down, so they swipe the lock screen hundreds of times. When a new message finally arrives, it is from WeChat Steps, telling you that you walked 8 steps today and rank 104th.

Other clinical symptoms of FOMO include:

• When a catchphrase suddenly takes off, you are among its first users; if you aren't, you quickly look up what it means and start using it fluently;
• You are careful never to use an outdated word (imagine that, to this day, if someone slips and says "duang," the room fills with the awkwardness of a comedy skit at the Spring Festival Gala);
• You open an article you have no interest in because a few of your friends shared it;
• You read at lightning speed but don't take in a single word; you just feel the urge to understand the world within half an hour;
• You open a group chat, see a hundred-plus messages, and read them one by one, even if they are all "Happy birthday, XXX" with cake emojis raining down for three minutes straight;
• You check Weibo's trending topics every day, reassuring yourself that you haven't lost touch with this turbulent world.

It looks like internet addiction, but really it's just a heart in pain.

2. Habitual Social Passing

A complication of FOMO. Friends with acquired social passing often watch their contacts' various updates on social networks, clearly seeing them but pretending not to.

The concept of social passing was proposed by Michael S. Bernstein, a professor in Stanford University's computer science department, and Facebook's data science team. They analyzed one month of data from 220,000 users and found that each post visible to friends was seen by 35% of friends on average, and that over a month a user's posts reached 61% of friends on average. But when they surveyed more than 500 users about their impressions, those users believed any given post was seen by only 6% of their friends, and that their posts in a month reached less than 20% of their audience. In other words, your real audience on social networks is far larger than you imagine. They all saw it. They just don't reply to you.

The Lab once ran a poll, "In What Situations Do You Choose 'Social Passing'?", which drew 3,446 responses. The results suggest your habitual social-passing friends don't reply to you for roughly these reasons:

• Habitual social silence has made them lifelong lurkers. They follow the principle of "I watch, you move," playing the aloof, haughty spectator (19.9%). Yes, they don't reply to you. They don't reply to anyone;
• Another group of poor souls replied N times and never got a response. Their tender hearts badly wounded, they tearfully went "from fan to passerby" (11%);
• Some feel that, since "you @-ed someone else and not me," replying would be presumptuous, so they quietly tell themselves it's none of their business (8.8%).

A habitual social passer may look like this: apart from the truly, deeply introverted, most of them say, "I don't have social phobia, I get sky-high when I party with friends," "It's not that I can't shoot the breeze, I'm just afraid you guys couldn't handle it," or "You're all so boring, I can't be bothered to join in." Right: I am the one who chose not to play with you.

3. Douban Disease

A condition in which you dare not say whether a film is good without checking its Douban score and reading the Douban reviews.

To test for this disease, first ask yourself: if someone asks, "Did you think Monkey King: Hero Is Back was good?" or "Did you think The Assassin was good?", can you answer without thinking?

Without thinking about the Cannes award or the rise of Chinese animation, ignoring the Douban rating and the paid shills, and not worrying that the person asking might see you in a new light ("Ah, so you're that kind of person") and never go on a pleasant date with you again, simply say whether you understood it and whether you liked it. Do you dare?

After the release of The Assassin, whose heroine barely speaks, we ran a poll, "What Are You Like After Watching a Film You Totally Didn't Understand?", which gathered 2,146 responses. More than a quarter of people seek refuge on Douban. They read "None of You Actually Understood XXX" and "XXX, Shot by Shot: 100 Brilliant Details," see the light, and then memorize a few short reviews they like, some one-star and some five-star. When they comment, they use the formula "Although... but... I think...", which sounds perfectly balanced and puts a line, and a level, between them and the brainless fans and brainless haters.

It's only a movie. Why must every opinion first receive guidance from the Douban Rinpoche?

Maybe I simply don't have much of an opinion. My experience and knowledge are limited, after all, and I can't deliver a sharp, clear verdict on everything. Besides, expressing yourself takes skill. Sometimes it isn't that we want to sound profound with words like "masterpiece"; it's just that we don't know how to put a thousand subtle, stirring feelings into words, and the moment a technical term is called for, we lose our nerve.

You have no view of your own and expressing one is hard, yet you can't accept a self that lacks original insight and a way with words. So you patch things together from other people's experience and phrasing, flipping through Douban and Zhihu while assembling "your own" views. This is Douban Disease.

4. Squirrel Syndrome

Marked by collecting and buying large quantities of things you like, just like a squirrel preparing for winter, and then forgetting where you hid them.

We once ran a call for entries, "Prove You Have Squirrel Syndrome in One Sentence", and received 5,516 responses. Taken together, the common cases look like this:

• Books come in like an avalanche and get read like silk being reeled, one thread at a time: while others read books, I copy down their titles;
• The films in your collection would play for a year end to end; you don't remember what's there, and when you suddenly want to watch one, you discover only after the download finishes that you downloaded it long ago;
• You feel safe only with two of everything; in basics alone you own a dozen or twenty black, white, and striped T-shirts, and you simply fall apart when something comes in several colors;
• You open your browser and the bookmarks list fills the whole screen...

A Squirrel Syndrome sufferer's most familiar move is to "mark" something and never look at it again. Another Lab survey, "Things You 'Mark' and Never Look At," shows that the things most often marked and then mercilessly forgotten are: reading lists (27%), app rankings (25%), fitness tutorials (12%), work how-to articles such as "The Complete Guide to Useful Excel Tricks" (10%), open courses (7%), and analyses of some XX incident (6%).

Don't even mention reading lists: seeing the list, adding the books to your cart, receiving them, and opening them completes only the first half of "books come in like an avalanche, get read like silk being reeled." With app rankings, if there is no one-tap download, nobody has the patience to go looking. With fitness tutorials and open courses, sharing or saving them gives you the illusion that you will actually live an active, healthy life. Excel tricks fall into the category of "I'll need this someday, whenever that is, but right now I really don't want to read it." And long articles... unless they're gossip, you probably won't finish them anyway.

When you save all these things, they look like a squirrel's winter supplies. Yet you know you'll never read that saved reading list, right?

5. Methodology Obsession

A condition in which you make no effort at all until you know the correct way to do something.

A sufferer of Methodology Obsession is like the little horse in a modern version of the fable "The Little Horse Crosses the River." Already standing at the riverbank with a load on its back, it goes around asking the ox and the squirrel, searches Google and Baidu, and even trawls Douban and Zhihu, only to find that "the water is deep." Unable to find the correct way to tackle this river, it finally throws down its load and gives up.

The Lab also ran a survey on this modern disease and found that Methodology Obsession is most common in the worlds of fitness and food.

Sufferers in the fitness world look like this: they want to work out, and spend several days just reading up on the difference between Insanity and HIIT; they agonize for several more days over whether to hire a personal trainer and where to find one; then choosing gear and getting it delivered takes several days more. They also tend to overthink: "I need to master the method first. What if I only want to lose belly fat and end up with thick legs from running?"

Sufferers in the food world account for four-tenths of the votes. 19.7% of these foodies go to Zhihu to find out which brand tastes best even before buying instant noodles, feeling that "the world hides too many product secrets; I can no longer buy anything without guidance." 16% feel that the decades before they read "How to Eat a Mango/Pomegranate/Orange Correctly" were wasted, and now want to eat fruit in the most correct way possible. 7.6% can't stand imprecise recipes and burst into tears at the words "some" or "a pinch."

Methodology Obsession looks clinically much like procrastination: in both, you don't act. The difference is that the former comes from anxiety about information. In the internet age, guides and tutorials are too many and too easy to find. One guide may not really point you "south," as the Chinese word for guide promises, but at least it gives you a direction; read countless guides and you just get dizzy.

It isn't that the world's hidden rules have multiplied. It's only that the way we gain life experience has changed, and there are more methodologies to choose from. But is any one of them truly the most correct? As in the ending of the little horse's story, even if it has Baidu and Zhihu as well as the ox and the squirrel, whether it gets across still depends on stepping into the river. You know, you can get pregnant even if the position isn't quite right.

6. Instant Gratification Syndrome

This disease has an English abbreviation that reads almost like an incantation: IWWIWWIWI (I want what I want when I want it). It is a psychological condition in which people, when they want something, expect to be satisfied anytime, immediately.

The Lab's survey "What Do We Increasingly Need 'Instant Gratification' For?" received 2,631 responses. 23% feel that a package taking more than three days means they have already waited a lifetime, and 15.7% say that if they starve to death, it will be because the takeout they ordered 20 minutes ago still hasn't arrived. Other clinical symptoms include:

• A recommendation without a link is a dirty trick: "How could I possibly go find it myself?" A few links are all that separate a scoundrel from a saint;
• I need Taobao customer service online at all times, ideally able to tell me at three in the morning which size to order;
• I press one button and a car comes for me immediately, and if the driver can't find the way and keeps asking which intersection I'm at, I get angry;
• Life experience comes not from living but from "waiting online for answers" and "What Is It Like to XX?"...

To some extent, catching this disease isn't entirely your fault. More and more tech companies are determined to make people impatient. The smartphone is already too smart: it is both an entertainment device and the command center for all kinds of services, and you can binge shows, shop, hail a car, and book laundry service on it. Mat Honan, a writer for Wired, put it this way: "I can order flowers from BloomThat and have them at my door within 90 minutes; I don't feel like cooking, so I have a private chef make something healthy and tasty on Munchery, and it's not expensive; Washio can take my dirty laundry; Zeel can send a masseuse... Damn, this phone is scarily attentive... ah... crack! OK, no problem, iCracked will come right over and fix the broken screen."

Online marketing expert Neil Patel points out that, psychologically, people are naturally impatient because they seek satisfaction as quickly as possible. To keep consumers happy, today's businesses meet their demands without limit, so that life feels endlessly convenient and people feel pampered in every corner of it. That pampering is how this tongue-twister of a disease came about.

7. Cringe Syndrome

A condition in which, when you see or hear someone going through something you find embarrassing, you can't help feeling it yourself, and want to hide as if you were the one involved.

This disease flares up often, sometimes with a wave of discomfort through the shoulders and neck. You hunch your neck, rub your hands together not knowing how to react, and think: "Oh my god."

As the years season you and your emotional intelligence and worldliness improve, Cringe Syndrome flares up more and more often:

• On TV, a Mary Sue heroine makes a fool of herself in front of a brooding, domineering male lead, who overlooks her clumsiness and stupidity and, overbearing yet tender, treats her as his precious little darling;
• You go to a restaurant with a friend, and they boss the waitstaff around and put on airs;
• You chat with someone who confidently mispronounces words or proper names, laughing and talking with total assurance and getting everything wrong;
• An older relative haggles over prices in places where bargaining is completely out of place;

Whenever we want to say "Ah, I don't know this person" or "This guy and I are not the same species," Cringe Syndrome is flaring up.

Besides outdated styles (My Fair Princess), the causes of Cringe Syndrome include the gap between ability and result (confidently getting your English wrong), inappropriate displays of emotion (couples quarreling in public), and the person's baffling lack of emotional intelligence (Ye Xuan)...

Still, the occasional attack of Cringe Syndrome also reminds you how closely you are tied to this world. In a sense, only people sensitive and delicate enough can feel embarrassment on such a vast scale, just as Jack Kerouac said in The Dharma Bums: Stay forever young, stay forever awkward.

Friends, every day, every minute, every second, as you can see, countless sufferers of modern diseases are in agony. Those of you who are still normal need to lend a hand, care for them, and help them with your actions. By reading this article, you can change their lives. No doubt about it: Just slap it! Come to think of it, what self-indulgent nonsense is all this?

QDaily Research Lab is a survey column of QDaily, an interactive platform for discussing all kinds of lifestyle questions. It may address changes and trends in lifestyle, or the service of a particular brand. Here you can vote, vent, and take a stand.