Without Noticing It, You May Be Living a Secondhand Life | 100 Big Questions About Life

When you find that every problem in your life already has an answer online, it means someone else has already lived your whole life for you.

A secondhand life is a condition: you find that every problem you run into already has an answer in a search engine.

How to dress so you look understated and elegant, where to eat cheaply and well, which headphones are the better buy, take the job or study for the graduate exam, buy bitcoin or not — someone has answered all of it for you. You also find that a whole crowd of people have used photos, videos, jokes and ads to hand you a carefully finished world, one that is usually prettier, more interesting, deeper, funnier and more tasteful than your own. If contemporary life is an open-book exam, then rather than work out the answers slowly on your own, you have the pros laying a set of top-scoring answers in front of you for reference.

Note that you may well look down on even those top-scoring answers — but that usually rests on having already thought about the messy details of life yourself, without yet reaching a conclusion of your own. More likely, you find the thinking itself messy, and so you take the top-scoring answers with no wariness at all.

Or it doesn't even have to be a top-scoring answer. After all, “that's what everyone says about it.”

Imagine a situation that sounds a little sad: the things you buy have the highest review scores, the books you read come from some influencer's list, the poses in your photos are lifted from Instagram bloggers, your holiday goes to one of the “20 places you can't miss,” and your Valentine's Day gift is the “best gift for a boyfriend” you found on Zhihu. Your opinions come from how other people “see” a thing, and your experiences follow how other people “tell you the experience feels.” You have picked up a student's habit: whenever life hands you a new exam paper, your first move is to go online and look up the answer key.

Sad? There is a newer sadness in not finding any of that sad.

Most of us are certain the earth is round, because the textbooks say so, because the evidence from authoritative experts says so, and because we have a habit of trust in textbooks and experts that we arrived at by reasoning. That trust later moved to the brands and merchants in the market, whose standardized service is as exact and unquestioned as a law of the universe — you can crack open any can of Coca-Cola from any vending machine and pour it down your throat without a thought, never afraid it is poisoned, never startled by the fizz in your nose. Now the same habit of trust has moved again, to review rankings, Douban ratings, Taobao buyer photos, Instagram bloggers and Zhihu influencers. They tell you what the world is like, what living a life feels like, and what the wisest way to live it is. They have pieced together a screened sample of a life for you; you only have to copy it.

The French scholar Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, described the spectacle as “a new kind of social relation between people, mediated by images.” In the society of the spectacle, relations between commodities replace relations between people. Absorbed by the spectacle, people lose their own longing for real life and their own demands on it. Debord argued that the spectator does not think; he submits to the spectacle he watches. The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the images, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. His gestures are no longer his own, but those of another person who performed them for him.

A note to readers: setting all this out does not mean the article takes an agnostic view of life (everyone speaks in their own interest, so nobody is telling the truth), and it certainly does not mean we recommend throwing out all received experience and blazing your own trail (“I don't buy Douban ratings at all — if everyone says a film is terrible, I have to go see whether someone is trashing it on purpose”). We are only raising a faint warning about why life has become so uniform. Are you living your own days, or the days someone else wants you to live — while spending your money on them?

To go into the secondhand life in more detail, I have picked five angles. As for how to get out of it: honestly, that is much harder than living a secondhand life.

Secondhand Individuality | How the Differences We're Born With Get Lost

“Individuality” is an absurd word to begin with. Every person is already a completely different individual to everyone else; the difference is there from the start. And yet people need individuality, urgently. The more we exalt differentiated individuality, the more it shows how badly we have been made alike.

The French scholar Jean Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that the pursuit of “individuality” is really the passive acceptance of a sign, used to join a group or leave one. “Objects” no longer carry their original meaning; they are only social signs available for consumption.

In today's consumer society, people are long used to handing part of themselves over to objects and letting objects live part of their lives for them. Japanese-style Uniqlo or Korean-style Dongdaemun, a Xiaomi band or an Apple Watch, Guo Jingming or Alice Munro on the shelf — each of them speaks for what kind of person you are. Your individuality can be defined by the standardized objects you own. “A closet full of Uniqlo” or “the complete Guo Jingming on the shelf” may be enough on its own to put you at the bottom of some “chain of contempt.” Which means that inside this system of judgment, you have exactly the same individuality as everyone else with a closet full of Uniqlo or the complete Guo Jingming. Your uniqueness disappeared because of what you bought.

The odd part is that we think it beneath us to run with the crowd, and we are also afraid of standing out. The chains of contempt everywhere point to one fact: people are not that tolerant of individuality. What passes for individuality today all comes out of niche taste, because niche means “not like most people” — but a niche has to be mainstream enough inside the niche; one person is not a niche. In other words, “individuality” has to satisfy at least the expectations of some niche. Once staying in shape becomes the general standard for a quality life, not working out means falling below the standard, which produces a deep sense of guilt. When fitness is politically correct, you are not allowed the individuality of not working out.

Consumer society also believes in customer first, which gave us “personalized customization,” usually in the form of “recommended for you.” At bottom that too is sorting you into categories and reinforcing the preferences you already share with similar samples in the database. In other words, your “uniqueness” is growing more and more like the “uniqueness” of the people who resemble you.

Secondhand Love | ayawawa's “theories” still have a big market, mainly because people want experience more than they want truth

The trend of the information age is that anything you would have to try and work out for yourself, you first look up in the guides and in other people's accounts. Love is no exception. How to date, how to fall in love, how to keep it going, how to get back together, when to break up — other people have written it all down.

Zygmunt Bauman argues in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor that dependence on the market damages people's ability to develop social skills; relationships become brief and unstable, and people can only turn to the market's goods, its services and its expert advice. Couples are eager to solve the problems of intimacy with gifts, couple's packages and relationship courses, which is at bottom an attempt to reduce the uncertainty of love and marriage. Best of all would be a standardized formula to follow, one you could simply apply. That is why psychological “effects” of every kind are so popular in relationship manuals, and why ayawawa's “theories” can look utterly absurd and still have a huge market.

When people look for a partner, they inevitably describe the other person in metrics. Unlike in the past, they use fewer character words — “brave, kind, upright” — because those are hard to quantify. Under market logic, words for resources and for abilities convertible into resources — “talent, beauty, career, annual salary” — more often become the standard for choosing a mate. To find someone who will love you, you have to work frantically at your own capital for being loved: men need more money, women need slimmer bodies. Love comes as a form with seven items on it, ticked and scored one by one, until you find someone with a high overall score and the two of you form a team to complete the big project called marriage.

And you are not the only one going through love by the book. Your partner is inside the same system. The two of you follow the script you are supposed to follow — date, dinner, a film, what to eat the first time, where to go the second — smiling at each other's dating technique.

Secondhand Attitudes | Attitudes Often Arrive Like This: Here Are a Few Camps, Just Pick a Side

In an internet society, the insight or idea you racked your brain to reach turns out, after one search, to have been found by someone else long ago. Every field has its specialists; rather than think it through yourself, looking up what the experts in that field say is obviously better value.

The moment something happens, you habitually go to Zhihu to see how the influencers are judging it; before you finish an article you scroll to the bottom to see what the commenters said. Rather than think, it is much easier to repost an influencer's take and let it stand for your own. Once that dependence becomes a reflex, it is easy to treat opinions as self-evident facts. Attitudes often arrive in this form: here are a few camps, all you have to do is pick a side.

Secondhand Needs | The Need Is Not for the Thing Itself, but for Difference

Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that in primitive exchange every relationship makes society richer, while in our “society of differentiation” every social relationship adds to the individual's sense of lack, because anything you own is made relative the moment it is compared with what others own (in primitive exchange, the richness came from the relationship with others itself). In this consumer society occupied by signs, the need is not a need for the thing itself but a need for difference. And because difference always exists, the need can never be met.

When you get the newest top-spec iPhone, you are full of satisfaction, pleasure and happiness, and if someone then tells you the iPhone 2 is out and beats yours in every respect, you can perhaps still hold steady. But then you notice everyone around you is on the iPhone 4, and the thought “I've fallen behind” takes root. The need to buy a thing turns into the need to replace it. Every small change to a product carries the same message: “what you own is becoming a synonym for out of date; you need something better, something different.”

Personal growth and worth are also expressed through upgrades. A cheap Yiwu broom last year, a Dyson vacuum this year — that shows the quality of your life has risen, that your life is moving forward. Go from SK-II last year to Dabao this year and your friends will gasp: “how did things get so bad for you?”

To manufacture more difference, consumer logic uses not only replacement but the endless slicing of the market. Beauty is sliced into the high-class face, the swan neck, the peach hip, the butterfly back, the male-dog waist; juicers come as centrifugal juicers, cold-press juicers and blenders; a vacuum cleaner comes with ten nozzles. Under the bombardment of the e-commerce platforms, you are fed health concepts, quality-of-life aesthetics and consumption values. Shopping festivals and every kind of spend-more-save-more promotion never fail to make you buy a pile of things you do not need.

Secondhand Experience | “After All, the Essence of Humanity Is a Repeat Machine”

The difference between a secondhand life and curiosity is this: curiosity wants to know more; a secondhand life submits completely to what it already knows.

When you read “what it's like to travel to Iceland,” “what it's like to have a Japanese girlfriend” or “what it's like to eat at Restaurant A,” you may simply want to know what other people's lives are like. But if you happen to be going to Iceland, or you have just started seeing a Japanese girlfriend, or you are about to eat at Restaurant A, then once you have read someone else's account you will carry out your own experience along their lines without noticing. If they say the patterns on Restaurant A's eaves are lovely, you will look up at the eaves as you walk in — and whether or not you find them lovely, you are having the experience the way they told you to have it.

And once you notice that the experience they describe sounds better than anything you would find on your own, it becomes easy to go to Iceland, or to be with your Japanese girlfriend, from the angle they handed you. Along the way even your sweet nothings may be internet catchphrases copied off Douyin. After all, “the essence of humanity is a repeat machine.”

Cover image and illustrations by Zheng Shuya