How to Become a Better Person in 2019? 100 Sincere Suggestions | 100 Big Questions About Life

潘姜汐熹 · 2019-01-11 · English translation

In this magnum opus, we share some life lessons that go beyond "use your phone less, read more, sleep early, wake up early, exercise more."

On the question of how to live well, Montaigne — the French thinker who served as the philosophical ATM you quoted from in your school essays as a kid — offers an approach worth borrowing.

His method was to raise the practical questions everyday life throws at you. How do you reassure a friend who believes a witch has cursed her? How do you make a sad neighbor laugh through her tears? How do you handle someone who won't listen to reason? If your dog wants to go out and play but you'd rather stay at your desk and write, what do you say to the dog? And then he would answer each one concretely, out of his own experience, telling us what he did in each situation and how it felt while he was doing it. The experiences are so small they hardly count as advice, but they land — you read yourself into them.

Like Montaigne, we think every unremarkable personal experience is worth sharing.

Over the past year, through translated features, interviews and other reporting, QDaily has recorded what a lot of people thought and did when they ran into a specific situation, and QDaily Research Lab has collected plenty of life lessons from readers through its interactive questionnaires. We've pulled 101 of them into the list below.

Some we've tested ourselves and found useful, some are pure jokes, and for others we're not sure they work at all — but there's no harm in considering them. Either way, they suit the job of saying goodbye to a 2018 we bet you wouldn't dare live through twice. If they happen to help a few friends put something into practice in 2019 and avoid repeating old mistakes, we'll be glad.

101 is a lot, so we've sorted them by how many people or things you're dealing with, and whether those things are real or virtual: what to draw on when you face yourself, one other person, many people, many physical objects, and many intangible ones. Here they all are —

On Getting Along With Yourself

Illustration: a person alone

If you catch yourself thinking "this year I'm definitely going to find a partner," keep it to yourself — don't say it out loud. Finding a partner comes down to luck in the end, so do your best to avoid jinxing it by planting a flag.
If you're the type who loses interest after three minutes, do it the moment you think of it and forget about sticking with it for the long haul. Just stretch those three minutes of enthusiasm a little longer, and your life is already a success.
Ask "what's it like" less often, and accumulate more first-hand experience of your own.
Read fewer of those secondhand "all of X in five minutes" wisdom-concentrate books. Wang Xiaobo said that knowledge can bring happiness, but if you compress it into a pill and force it down, you lose all the pleasure in it.
Still, reading fragments beats reading nothing. In a conversation with QDaily, Kevin Tsai said, "In the old days so many people couldn't get hold of books, couldn't read characters, couldn't lay hands on a single printed thing, had no chance to study at all. How can you think now is an age of fragmentation — was there ever an age of complete, uninterrupted reading? I have never once seen a society that truly loved reading. I've never seen such a thing."
Shut your mouth before you brag about how much you've read. Reading isn't a competitive-eating contest — some people get through tens of thousands of books and still absorb nothing but the chicken soup.
Record your life honestly, and don't be afraid of thin, monotonous material. Zhu Tianxin said: if you can't honestly face who you were at seventeen or eighteen — even if that self was impoverished, petit-bourgeois, a little monotonous and narrow — how could you face who you'll be at fifty, at sixty? All we can do is choose to write honestly, even when the subject is small.
Go through it, don't go around it. Ah Cheng said: when a novel's protagonist hits an unresolvable conflict and the only way out is for the other party to get hit by a car and die, that's "car-crash writing." It goes around the problem. So whether the piece is long or short, when you hit a problem, what do you do? Go through it.
A bad time can also be a good time. The British novelist Sarah Waters said, "In Britain, a lot of great gay literature was written during periods of repression." If you're a member of the LGBT community, it's time to pick up your pen and write something for the ages.
There's nothing wrong with being reserved and quiet, and you don't need to work out how to "overcome" it. Cheerful, lively, approachable, brimming with energy — these traits all line up, more or less, with our culture's pursuit of fitting in and putting others first. But extroverted or introverted, sunny or quiet, "accept yourself, respect others" is the more basic rule. You be everyone's darling; I'll be the fifth-ranked melancholy boy of North China. That's fine too.
When someone asks "why aren't you talking," try widening your eyes in mock horror and asking, "You can see me?"
Let yourself be angry. Anger is one of the highest-information-density forms of communication — it can force us to listen to each other and face a problem head-on.
But be careful not to let anyone make money off your anger, or use it to hurt other people. Manufacturing conflict to grab attention is, at bottom, a way of manipulating people. Anger gets used constantly to manufacture spectacle and hold ratings up. Producers want viewers angry all the time, and they take no responsibility for what that stoked emotion leads to, or for helping anyone work through it.
When you see news that stirs you up, first sort out whether what it says is fact or opinion. The rule of thumb: "facts can be true or false; opinions have no right or wrong." In theory an opinion should rest on facts, and the same facts can produce different opinions. Facts can be questioned and disproved; opinions can't be right or wrong, only agreed or disagreed with.
Think freely, live bravely. The historian Luo Xin said: living bravely — I think nothing matters more than going on living bravely, thinking freely, surviving bravely. Thinking freely has become very hard now. Sometimes free expression isn't entirely up to you, but thinking is yours to decide. You have to think for yourself, read for yourself, write for yourself, whether or not you can say it out loud.
If your body feels wrong, see a doctor now. Don't save up money for the hospital and the funeral home instead.
Masturbation is such a good thing — why would you quit? For men, ejaculating twice a week is associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer than ejaculating less than once a month. For women it's also all upside and no downside: keep it hygienic and it's safe and secure, and because you're entirely in control, it guarantees an orgasm. Orgasm can relieve migraines, help you sleep, even lower your risk of heart disease. As the Japanese OB-GYN Mihyon Song put it, "women should really masturbate more too."
Even if you're not single and living alone, handling a sudden urge yourself is completely normal. In the survey of Chinese sexual behavior run by Pan Suiming, a professor at Renmin University of China, single people consumed pornography less often than people living with a partner: the latter were 1.7 times as likely as the former to have watched porn in the past year. When it comes to desire, it's ideal if your partner happens to be in the mood too, but if only one side is burning with enthusiasm, porn is simply the more efficient, less troublesome option.
Also, stop creepily begging strangers for the source of an adult video, or using the request as a pretext for something else. There are plenty of porn sites online. Go watch them.

When You're Talking One-on-One With Someone

Illustration: two people talking

If you want your crush to notice you, being deliberately mysterious won't do it. The best method is always to be sincerely yourself — without offending anyone. Relationship psychology has a concept called the "reciprocity principle," which, put simply, says "we like people who like us." Compared with either constant pandering or studied distance, expressing yourself and acting sincerely makes you look more reliable.
Playing cold and aloof may work less well than you think. If it isn't really your nature, just be as you are. According to Erika Ettin, founder of the US dating site A Little Nudge, acting distant does often raise a person's appeal in the short term, especially with the risk-takers of the dating world. But if what you want is a long-term partner, that attitude is a gamble.
Don't make a big deal out of instant replies. We're all lazy, procrastinating humans, not Siri.
When a friend posts a line of song lyrics, resist the dumb urge to comment guessing the song or continuing the verse — your friend obviously knows what song it is. Better also not to leave a leering "ooh~ something going on?" out of concern for their love life. Or, if you secretly have a crush on them, it's more efficient to just ask.
Court someone properly, whether for love or for sex. Li Yinhe: a man has to respect women. If you want to sleep with her, if you want her body, go court her properly for love. Or rather, it doesn't have to be courting for love — courting for sex is fine too. You say, I really like you, I'm attracted to your body, would you be willing to sleep with me? You discuss it with her properly.
Before or during, say no to any sexual act that feels wrong to you. I don't want to have sex with you; I'm not in the mood today; no oral; this position is uncomfortable; no facials, I don't want semen all over my face — you can actually say all of these out loud.
For heaven's sake, stop calling yourself or anyone else a "fairy." The word has inflated to the point where it means nothing more than "pretty girl."
When the other person won't stop talking, ask a basic "dumb question." Elaine Swann, who studies everyday etiquette, says that when you're talking with someone who has a strong presence and loves to interrupt, you can try basic "dumb questions" to open a new line of conversation. Pick a term out of their monologue that you're at least a bit curious about and ask them to explain it — that lets you switch topics without them noticing.
To steer the conversation elsewhere unnoticed, you can also try "right, right, exactly, and also…" The psychologist Clare Amos says the best method is to agree first, with phrasing like "you're absolutely right, and also…" or "right, right, and I heard…" Whatever follows will sound natural, because once the brain takes in a sentence of agreement, it tends to accept what comes next along with it.
Build the other person an exit ramp into your question. If a friend is late, instead of "where are you," ask "are you going to be a bit late?" or "traffic, or did something come up?" At work, instead of "when will this be done," ask "does this need to slip, and by how much?" When you sense someone has been through something bad, write the bad situation into the question and show you understand it first — they'll find it easier to come clean with you.
Try to convey information and feeling accurately without leaning on filler sounds like "uh," "um," and "y'know."
Resist the urge to play back the voice message you just sent. Your voice isn't going to get any better, and your life will be a precious few dozen seconds longer for it. Don't underestimate those seconds; enough of them add up to another round of your game.
If someone around you is depressed, stop reminding them to look on the bright side. "Not only will this fail to cheer them up, it backfires and deepens their sense of not being understood. As a supporter, your job isn't to make them happy — it's to acknowledge that the situation is bad, that their pain is real," says the psychotherapist Megan Devine, author of It's O.K. That You're Not O.K.
Bring in professionals rather than going it alone. However patient and loving you are, you cannot fix a friend's serious depression by yourself. They need the professional support of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers or other medical specialists. Make the first appointment as easy as possible: sit beside your friend while they call to book it, and help them find counseling they can afford.
At the same time, take care of yourself and set boundaries. When someone we've loved for years, someone thoughtful and kind, falls into depression, they can turn uncharacteristically harsh and self-centered. You have to set clear boundaries in simple, direct language — for example, "You sound like you're in a lot of pain right now, but you can't curse at me."

When You Have to Deal With More Than One Person

Illustration: a group of people

Turn down parties you don't want to attend as early as you can.
If it isn't necessary, don't call. In QDaily Research Lab's survey on phone-call phobia, 38.8% of respondents said their first reaction to a call from a stranger was to "pick up reluctantly," and 35.4% described how they felt after hanging up on a friend's small-talk call as "finally over." Even when people need to reach someone fast — say, meeting a friend somewhere and failing to find each other — they'd still rather send a WeChat message or a text first than call.
Get consent before forwarding a friend's or colleague's WeChat contact card to someone else. This is basic online manners by now.
Your taste is not your ability. Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting; following bloggers with ideas doesn't give you ideas; reading great work doesn't mean you can make anything like it. So don't spend so much of your résumé playing up your taste and your reading volume. It proves almost nothing.
Open the package the moment it arrives, throw out the takeout container the moment you finish eating, scoop the litter box the moment the cat is done. Do all of that, and then call yourself someone who follows through.
The "slash" multi-hyphenate is out of fashion! Stop announcing that you're the "North China Hopscotch Champion" or the "Xiangxi Betel-Nut Chewing Champion." Interesting souls love inventing first-place titles for their social media bios. The rankings may not be real, but if there were a Most Clichéd Bio Contest, they'd take first place for real.
Take an ID photo that isn't posed with your arms folded across your chest — unless you want to look like a personal trainer, a securities advisor, a pro esports player, or one of those internet gurus who can sell an online course just by slapping "marketing training: hands-on projects" across the frame in bold.
To make meetings more efficient, take turns reading a memo instead of making slides. Very often a slide deck is a handy prop that takes enormous time and effort to build and is designed to bluff your way through the meeting. Preparing a concise, forceful narrative is much harder than dropping keywords and phrases onto a slide — it makes you stop, straighten out your logic, and organize it into a complete statement that might actually spark something in someone else.
If you keep feeling you've forgotten something at work, open a blank Word document and it will all come back to you. Including but not limited to: an unwashed mug, two packs of tissues you need to buy, a reading list you bookmarked, a show you're following that just updated.
"Nice" doesn't get you far at work — being good at the job beats being well-liked. Miriam Gensowski, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed the largest study of high-IQ people ever run, which began in 1922 and tracked the careers of about 1,500 Americans, all with IQs above 140. The data showed that the best-liked, most popular 20% of the men earned roughly $270,000 less over a lifetime on average, and that the gap only began to show around age 30, widening most between 40 and 60.
Be unconventional, but you don't have to refuse to fit in. Zhang Dachun coined the term "unconventional conformity." A person needs a distinctive character on one side, he says, and the ability to connect and communicate with others on the other. The two can pull against each other: go with the crowd and you inevitably lose some individuality. But in life we sometimes need to stand apart and sometimes need to fit in, depending on the occasion. Take Li Bai — he had his unconventional side, and also his sociable side, the side that wrote poems in exchange with friends and traded verses back and forth. "Unconventional conformity" names the two faces of a poet like Li Bai.
Put some effort into closing the digital gap with your parents: set up their phone maker's cloud service, back up their contacts and photos, and keep a note of their account passwords on your own phone.
When you disagree, silence is the rude move. The floor is yours; say what you think. Research has found that when a brainstorm adds a rule allowing people to criticize each other's ideas, that kind of group discussion produces 16% more good ideas on average. From tech companies to hospitals to microbiology labs, the big breakthroughs tend to come from teams that challenge each other's views, not teams that flatter each other.
The best way to get a correct answer on the internet isn't to ask a question — it's to post a wrong answer. This is a law from Ward Cunningham, who created wiki software, and it rests on the insight that people never pass up a chance to correct someone else's mistake.
Argue, but don't brawl. No brawl has ever been classy. QDaily Research Lab laid out eight conditions for keeping an argument from turning into a brawl, and across 8,760 reader votes, "not denying the other person's standing to take part in the conversation" came out as the most important one (14.4%).
Respect every argument you get into online. The floor is arguing in your own words, rather than throwing a Zhihu link at someone and saying "you're talking nonsense — look at what this person says." Don't let the internet turn into a thesis defense where people lob references at each other. Being a worthy opponent beats being a Zhihu know-it-all.

When You're Dealing With Physical Objects

Illustration: assorted objects

Be a mature adult and don't put things in the bib pocket of your overalls or in a Mobike's front basket. They are, so to speak, the ultimate black holes for personal belongings.
Prevent hemorrhoids by not looking at your phone on the toilet.
Wipe down your phone. Don't use anything alcohol-based on the screen — it destroys the oleophobic coating. Apple's advice: unplug all cables, power the device off, use a slightly damp lint-free soft cloth such as a lens cloth, and keep moisture out of the openings.
If you're a plant killer, don't start with succulents — and don't use a cactus to test your skills either. Spare the cactus.
If you're not someone who loves taking photos and posting them, you don't need to go to a pop-up store, however cool its ads look.
If you unfortunately own a pair of pants labeled "Korean-style, skinny, trendy," bury it in the deepest part of the ocean.
Don't obsess over how thick or thin a condom is, and don't buy extra-large to save face. Fit is what makes the experience.
Don't buy underwear that comes five for 20 yuan. A good pair of underwear is the foundation of a good mood.
Don't buy a guitar, and definitely don't take one off a friend who found it useless while moving and decided to give it away. If you really can't help yourself, mark my words: on the day you move, you'll come back and repent.
But don't throw out that unused yoga mat. Sitting on it while you eat snacks reduces the guilt.
Every anti-hair-loss remedy is a scam. Save the money and buy a few more good-looking hats.
Big sales do come with real discounts, but buy too much and you almost certainly won't save any money.
Search Google or Bing for the brand a shopping platform claims is imported. If all you find is Chinese-language results, blacklist it.
When you've spent too long comparing prices and shopping, work out your pre-tax hourly income. The trade usually isn't worth it.
The trick to not shopping isn't just not buying things — it's not browsing them. In QDaily Research Lab's survey on this, we found that an unnecessary urge to buy, one that didn't exist before, is mostly created by "browsing a mall or Taobao's discount section and somehow ordering something you don't need" and "shopping with a friend, trying something on yourself, and buying it on impulse."
You have no important occasion to attend. Put that backless mermaid dress back on the rack.
Don't sign up for a hobby class in a rush of enthusiasm. That's just money you'd otherwise be throwing away.
Go to a museum with an open mind and an interest in art. That's enough. The art historian Fred Kleiner says, "Helping people understand is the curator's job — you can't ask visitors to read up and study before they even get to the museum. There are a lot of art institutions in the world that do this well, and a lot that don't." Don't let the bad ones fool you.
Watching Sleep No More, riding a half-broken shared bike, and keeping a cat while regularly cleaning cat hair off your seasonal clothes: the three most reliable ways for a young person today to get some real exercise.
Drink less milk tea.

When You're Dealing With Intangible Things (the Internet, Pop Culture, and a Few Others)

Illustration: a phone screen

Never open Taobao because you're bored. Never. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research analyzed six years of purchases by 2,500 consumers. 85% of them said that when shopping is only about showing off or filling something inside, the pleasure of it drops sharply and all you end up with is more boredom — and boredom and emptiness drive you to acquire still more things to fill the gap.
Turning your shopping apps gray may help cool the appetite. Shopping apps almost always use warm tones and busy color combinations to push you toward buying, but we can try to make that distraction disappear. iOS itself can turn the whole screen gray: go to Settings, and under the last option in Accessibility set Color Filters as a shortcut. Then, while you're browsing Taobao, triple-click the Home button — or triple-click the side button on an iPhone without one — and your Taobao page, along with your urge to shop, goes gray with it.
Quit the game before you reach the "just one more round" point.
A paid game is very likely more fun than a free one. The logic of a paid game is to sell you a game you'll enjoy playing; a free game is built to make it easy to start, and then does everything it can to get money out of you along the way. There's a classic line in game design: "the free players in a free-to-play game are the content served up to the paying players."
Stand on your own two feet. This year, buy your own video streaming subscription.
Don't watch any film billed as "China's first." If "China's first female-led suspense TV series" and "China's first large-scale ACG sitcom" already sound thin, then "China's first realist light-sci-fi romance drama about drones" amounts to writing a 5-out-of-10 Douban score straight into the opening credits.
When you're planning to see a 4D movie, don't pick one heavy on water or heavy on fights. Otherwise, when the hero gets beaten up, you're the one getting hit; when the hero beats someone up, you're still the one getting hit. When the hero is rained and blown on in the film, you get rained and blown on in the theater. The first is moving; the second gives you a cold.
GOT8 is out this year. Don't forget to keep up.
Download or preload the show you're watching with dinner before you open the food delivery, so the food isn't cold by the time the ads finish.
Don't expect a novel to hold "correct values." Ken Liu, the English translator of The Three-Body Problem and a science fiction writer himself: a novel is not an academic paper, nor a debate essay. Write a debate essay and it's a single-plank bridge — readers have no choice but to follow your line of thinking, because your whole intent is for them to understand and arrive at one particular conclusion. A novel is different. Write a novel that way and nobody will read it.
Stay calm, and don't pile on with the praise or the abuse for something you don't understand at all and have no interest in understanding. Fitting in isn't that important.
The first 30% of any video is skippable nonsense — jumping straight to the one-third mark barely affects the experience.
Accept blank stretches of time with nothing to do. Doing something boring to fight off boredom will only leave you more frustrated.
Don't believe any media prediction of "the next big thing." As with "the next big pop star," you can only rewind the film and point safely to the early signs after a star or a trend has already become a fact. Otherwise you may just be another Fang Zhongyong, the child prodigy who flamed out before he ever got anywhere.
Don't despair at the darkness — people were making beautiful things in darker times. The writer Luo Yijun said, "We've all already been constructed by this world, sitting fairly safely in our rooms watching the internet. But everything has become Kafkaesque. A sense of humiliation or suffocation passes through layer after layer of constructed corridors, rooms and office floors, suffocating you bit by bit. You won't feel, the way Wu Changshuo and his contemporaries did, the direct terror of starving to death or of the Cultural Revolution, or the inner humiliation and terror the late-Ming literati went through." "But even then, someone still painted such beautiful paintings, someone still wrote Dream of the Red Chamber, there were still such brilliant works. Like Dream Reminiscences of Tao'an (《陶庵梦忆》) — there are always some beautiful things."

Appendix: A Few Special Contributions From Our Colleagues

Illustration: a group of colleagues

Stop treating being single as an aberration. Since 2013 China's marriage rate has stopped growing and fallen year after year, while the divorce rate has risen every year since 2009. The hyper-single society has already arrived. You're just ahead of your time.
Be a bit more forgiving about feeling offended. If you went in hoping for a kiss at midnight on New Year's Eve and got Long Day's Journey Into Night instead, consider whether the film has value on its own terms. Not every movie is made to please its audience.
Don't put blind faith in authority, because "authority" may come from nothing more than a job title. Think about how game reporters and film critics actually work. Set the reviews and ratings aside, and trust yourself.
Don't put too much faith in "shuffle" or "recommended for you." If you have the time, try listening to a whole album straight through. Understanding a piece of music takes time.
Try to keep company plugs in your social media posts under one in ten. Carrying a pack of tissues when you go out is the equivalent of bringing a towel on an interstellar journey. Share your own thoughts, rather than finding something similar and reposting it.
Don't try to understand the phone industry's newly minted jargon — "aurora texture," "mystic night blue," "peacock screen." It's exactly the same as the beauty industry cooking up concepts nobody can parse. Just as you can't make sense of "black in every color of the rainbow," not understanding it is perfectly normal.
The trap in paying for an iPhone in installments is that "it only costs one coffee a day" sounds like a great deal, but it's the same logic as "drink one less cup of milk tea a day and in 30 days you'll have saved the price of 30 cups of milk tea."
Any app that wants you to look at its recommended feed first is a time black hole. Look at the feed of accounts you follow instead, and remind yourself not to waste too much time.
If a company asks you for a deposit and can't connect to Sesame Credit, assume by default that it's going to run off with your money.
Don't buy A-shares. Other markets are high risk, high reward. A-shares are high risk, negative reward.
If you're willing to spend big on Supreme, you should at least know that James Jebbia created it. If consumer culture is going to sweep you along, at least know what's sweeping you.
Make an effort to understand a voice you've never taken seriously. Understanding is hard, but you can try to find out what other people are actually doing and saying. So start with the people around you.
It's fine to use the cover as a guide when buying a book. Good publishers are willing to put effort into design too.
Eat fewer heavily processed foods — the snacks and drinks made with a lot of added sugar and salt and complicated formulas. When you can't resist, choose good snacks; don't be stingy about food. Meat eaters, why not try going vegetarian sometimes? It may not taste as bad as you imagine. Also: don't hold in your pee, and get regular checkups.
If all you want is the pure pleasure of reading, just start with a book you already like. From there you'll certainly find the next one you want to read. And take any advice with a grain of salt — the person giving it isn't necessarily wiser or better at living than you are, and every path is one you walk yourself. This one is no exception.

[100 Big Questions About Life] is QDaily's weekly column, following the small but hugely important developments in modern life — the kind of topic you'd raise with friends by starting "hey, has anyone else noticed…" It updates every Friday afternoon. Follow along.

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya

Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.