When you are young, you study hard, work, and save money, and when you retire in old age, you can start to enjoy the fruits of your hard work in a leisurely manner. A high school classmate shared a video on Facebook that we recorded in our classroom more than 20 years ago. At the end of class, there was a lot of noise in the class, some people were wearing jerseys to prepare for the game, some people were raising the bar, and some people couldn't wait to start eating the bento, which was really nostalgic. After graduating from high school, I never had the opportunity to eat bento with so many people, and I lost a lot of interesting experiences.
Bitter first, then sweet
What's the fun of eating bento together? Of course! In addition to enjoying more than 40 different bento dishes in the class at one time, you can also observe various "strategies" for eating bento. For example, the chicken leg bento, a favorite among high school boys, has at least 3 different offensive processes in our class: I was impressed by the way a classmate near me ate a bento, and it was because of him that I started to pay attention to eating bento. After opening the bento, he will carefully clip the shiny chicken leg to the lid of the bento, and then bury his head in the rice and side dishes, take a short break after eating, drink the winter melon tea that comes with it, and then pick up the "treasured" chicken leg with his hand and start to enjoy it slowly. When I saw it for the first time, I thought it was very interesting and asked him why he did this. He said, this is the principle of "bitterness before sweetness"! You see that the rice doesn't taste good, and the side dishes are also very chicken, so I solved these first, so I can save the best part for the end. Well, I think it makes sense!
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
The above is the first strategy of "bitter first, then sweet", and the next is strategy two, which can be regarded as "having fun in time"! High school students are in the middle of their development and often can't wait for their lunch break to get hungry. Some students will start to "look up at the blackboard and eat the bento with their heads down" in the third or fourth period! If you pick up the whole bento and eat it, the risk is too high, and it is easy to miss the meal with chopsticks and send it to your mouth, and the way to take into account the efficiency and risk is to attack the main dish at →the top of the bento, that is, chicken thighs and ribs, and the legs will be gone. Although it was a bit sad to think that there was only one box of rice left to eat at noon, at least I could temporarily satisfy my hunger for the moment, and I could finally listen to the teacher's permutations and combinations with peace of mind.
Bitterness before happiness vs. timely pleasure
In fact, if you think about it carefully, these two chicken thigh rice strategies are also two typical examples of "retirement planning". For the Chinese, Japanese and Korean peoples influenced by Confucian culture, "suffering first and then happiness" is definitely a virtue that our elders taught us from childhood. When you are young, you have to study hard, work hard, and save money, and when you are old and retired, you can start to enjoy the "big chicken legs" that you have worked hard for a lifetime, how perfect this plan is! As for the fact that "having fun in time" is of course not feasible, doesn't the story of "ants and mantises" warn us? Indeed, the classmate who ate the chicken leg first was really helpless in the face of the whole box of rice and not very good side dishes at noon.
However, the strategy of first suffering and then sweetness does not seem to be 100% perfect, and I witnessed a bento tragedy back then! At noon one day, the "bitter first and then sweet" classmate, trying hard to strip the rice, was about to eat the chicken legs, two classmates who were chasing next to him hit his table, and the whole intact chicken leg fell to the ground along with the empty box of the lunch, and rolled on the cement floor, evenly coated with "powder", this chicken leg brother worked hard to destroy it, and almost didn't beat the two white-eyed classmates, only to see his face blue and white, and sadly picked up the chicken leg and threw it into the trash. Of course, this is definitely an accident, maybe it will be like this once in thousands of years, but when applied to life planning, there are more and more such accidents.
As a few weeks before the outbreak of the fraud case, most employees of the Anlong Company, which was once the seventh largest model student among the top 500 companies in the United States, still said that they would continue to use the money from their retirement accounts to buy company stocks. At the same time as this article was written, Taiwan's textile giant Hualong was facing a financial crisis, owing employees hundreds of millions of yuan in severance pay and pensions, and employees took to the streets.
Maybe the TV celebrities can use this to make a large number of government incompetent and officials come forward to promise to coordinate as usual, but no matter how things evolve, the "chicken legs" that have been saved for a lifetime fall to the ground, and the bitter master is still this group of employees, and this kind of thing can happen to you and me another day. Seeing this, you must wonder, where can there be so many tricks for eating chicken leg rice, are you talking about special cases? Ordinary people have a bite of meat and a bite of rice! That's right, "bitterness before happiness" and "timely pleasure" are originally two extremes, and again, they are two extremes. To be honest, I also tried to finish the rice before nibbling on the chicken thighs, but I felt that the rich and balanced chicken thigh rice became bland and tasteless at first, but then it was too greasy, so I tried it once and didn't continue (especially after witnessing the "chicken dropping" incident). But have you ever wondered who says that life must be "endured" before it can be "enjoyed"?
Perhaps, in the simple and beautiful era in the past, when we were admitted to university and entered a good company, as long as we worked hard, the company would never treat us badly, and the salary may not be much, but the pension is like a lighthouse on the sea, even if it is far away, it will never disappear, guiding the direction of our life. Unfortunately, the world's economic system is constantly disintegrating and reorganizing: from graduation to retirement, the most memorable events of my parents' generation are the severance of diplomatic relations between China and the United States and the crisis in the Taiwan Strait (of course, these things are very big). But our generation, the Asian financial crisis, the credit crisis in the United States, and now the European debt crisis, even if you are only 30 years old, you should have experienced all of them from the time you left society. I think in my heart that my generation is doomed to be disappointed if we still have the simple idea of trying to save a sum of money and then enjoy it after retirement. This "chicken leg" is not as good as it used to be, and someone will steal it and knock it over at any time.
If you want to live a balanced, complete life, there are two things to keep in mind
Life is like eating chicken leg bento, wanting to eat all the rice first or gnaw off the chicken leg first is extreme, only the two are tasted together, is a balanced and complete life. Among them, there are two concepts that I often remind myself:
First, work is one of the most important parts of life, and if possible, it should be enjoyed, not endured. It's a bit of a shame to think of work as a means of making money, and it often makes it difficult to sustain work. A netizen once asked me how to plan for retirement, and my answer was that I never set a retirement age, and if I do the job I love, it doesn't matter what age I retire.
Second, if you want to live a leisurely life, do it right away, rather than expecting the day you retire in a few decades, because when that day actually comes, many things may not be as good as you imagined. In recent years, the idea of "mini-retirement" has been put forward by some people, which really won my heart. The average office worker often takes advantage of the hard-won vacation to plan a tight trip, and as a result, after a tiring journey, returning to work feels more tiring than not taking a vacation.
I have a friend who is very interesting, he will use two or three days of vacation, to stay in a familiar B&B in the south, sleep well, lazily read, eat leisurely, and chat with the neighbors. When I was studying in the United States, I also experienced the American way of vacation with my classmates, who often went their own way of going for a walk in the woods, sunbathing on the balcony, pulling up a hammock to read a book and napping, chatting together during meals, and doing their own things after eating. Such an idle vacation is a waste of time for us Taiwanese, but after I have experienced it myself, I deeply feel that this is the real rest.
The concept of separating life into two phases of "working at a young age" and "retirement at an old age" is outdated and risky to rely too much on the pension or annuity system. I think work should be part of a good life, and retirement planning should start early, so why not choose next weekend?