An Ideal Life of a Young Person

He once said that for a long time, he had been doing things that didn’t quite fit the expectations of society — things that sounded absurd but were, in a way, deeply deliberate.

He spent a hundred days vacuuming the streets of Beijing, collecting dust and smog particles until he could compress them into a single “smog brick.”

He gathered the phone numbers of a thousand illegal housing agents and painted them across twenty square meters of wall space, naming the work Beijing Black Talk.

He even registered a company with no purpose — a “meaningless company” — hiring people to do work that could never create profit.

And together with a few friends, he formed an art collective called I Am a Mistake, determined to make deliberate errors in a world obsessed with correctness.

He smiled when he said the title of his talk — A Young Person’s Ideal Life.

He and his collaborator called themselves “the Nut Brothers.”

He said that just before the talk, during the break, they had bought someone’s sentence for one yuan.

To him, the idea that a person could earn money simply by saying something was already a small piece of his ideal life.

He talked about how, before moving to Shenzhen, he had lived in a rural village.

There, he said, they had their own imagination of cities — shimmering places of progress — but when he arrived, he discovered that the city had its own logic that twisted everything familiar.

The chickens they raised back home were called “free-range” in the city; the mutts they kept were renamed “rural field dogs.”

Even the fresh air they had always breathed for free could be bottled and sold.

A simple countryside house, surrounded by sky, mountains, and water, could suddenly be renamed a “luxury villa.”

He said it took him a long time to think about what it meant to become a Shenzhen person, and even longer to think about what it meant to live ideally.

He started with the most basic question: how to live comfortably in a city.

In Shenzhen, he said, the average salary was around seven thousand yuan a month.

At that rate, if one didn’t eat or drink, it would still take more than sixty years to buy an eighty-square-meter apartment in Nanshan District.

So he wondered, how could he solve this with less money?

He built a house of paper — literally.

He collected real-estate advertisement newspapers, glued them over a wooden frame, covered the outer layer with red, white, and blue waterproof plastic, and built a small structure on a friend’s rooftop.

It was only two square meters, just enough to hold a folding bed.

The total cost was about two hundred yuan.

He said, “Apart from the heavy smell of ink from the ads, I slept very comfortably. The wind, the rain, the sound of cars outside — none of them bothered me.”

And since all those ads on the newspapers were front-page placements, he joked that the combined advertising value of the papers was about ten million yuan.

“So technically,” he said, “I was living in a ten-million-yuan mansion — and it even came with permanent usage rights.”

Then he said there was another way to solve the housing problem.

He told me about the time he pushed a battery-powered vacuum cleaner through the streets of Beijing for a hundred days, sucking up dust from every corner.

When the collection was complete, he mixed the PM2.5 and PM10 particles with clay and made a brick.

“When you can’t afford to buy a house,” he said, “you can make your own bricks.”

“If we collect enough, we can build the house ourselves.”

He said that besides housing, work was also essential to an ideal life — not just any job, but one that felt meaningful, or at least liberating.

So last year, he and his team founded a company in Shenzhen officially registered as Shenzhen Wuyiyi Co., Ltd. — The Meaningless Company.

They hired part-time employees, paid each one a hundred yuan for two hours, but the work itself had no meaning and no economic value.

One task, he said, was to sleep in broad daylight by the sea.

They set up hammocks on the beach, and the part-timer, whose specialty was “sleeping,” was paid to nap soundly.

Another job required employees to measure and analyze twelve bricks — to examine their size, appearance, and personality, then deduce each brick’s zodiac sign.

One woman spent eighty minutes studying and calculating, and at the end proudly announced the first ever historical classification of the twelve bricks’ astrological identities.

There was also a job to teach a fish to smile — genuinely, warmly, joyfully.

The hired worker bathed the fish, massaged it, and whispered comfort to it.

Eventually, he said, “the fish smiled.”

Another assignment was to applaud for a cockroach a hundred times — and then keep clapping.

The worker recorded fifty-six of the cockroach’s virtues.

“The forty-sixth,” he read, “is that it’s humble.”

“The fortieth: it doesn’t shout in public.”

“The thirty-sixth: it isn’t afraid of dirt.”

There was also the job of saying I love you underwater — loudly.

That worker stripped naked, submerged himself, and kept shouting I love you, though no one could hear it.

“Maybe the fish in the sea could,” he said.

He said an ideal life also needed marriage — or at least a rethinking of it.

In this society, he said, people often mocked or pitied those who were single.

A person who hadn’t dated was called a “single dog.”

Those who hadn’t married were labeled “leftover men” or “leftover women.”

So, he said, marriage had become burdened with far too many expectations — housing, cars, sex, reproduction, even social stability — all tightly tied together.

To explore this, he and his friends launched a public experiment.

They gathered four young people — three men and one woman — and asked them to roll dice on Weibo to decide who would marry whom.

The dice results paired one man with another, another man with the last man, and one man with the single woman.

“But since same-sex marriage isn’t legal in China,” he said, “the only pair who could register was the man and the woman.”

The woman’s name was Sun Shuxiang. The man was him.

They got married at the Fengtai District Civil Affairs Bureau in Beijing.

Within forty-eight hours — on the third day — they went to the Haidian District People’s Court to file for divorce.

They received 1,314 yuan as a “divorce gift.”

He laughed when he said, “Through this forty-eight-hour flash marriage and flash divorce, we fulfilled society’s strange need for ceremony.”

He added, “In the United States, 28% of people are single. In Europe — France, the UK — it’s even higher. In Northern Europe, 40 to 45%.

Marriage, from its beginning, was never an obligatory part of life.

Sometimes the truest form of happiness,” he said, “is simply — not getting married.”

He continued: an ideal life also meant learning how to have fun as failures.

According to success-theory standards, defined by wealth and power, or by slogans like ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ only one percent of the world’s people are successful — ninety-nine percent are not.

“We belong to the ninety-nine,” he said. “If we’re destined to fail, we still have the right to play.”

So they formed a band called Chainsaw That Bear and held a non-violent music festival.

They opened a bookstore that lasted only thirty days — and on the thirtieth day, it really did close.

They mailed one thousand packets of spring seeds to one thousand people across China, calling the project Having Seeds.

They proudly announced they had spent one hundred yuan to buy ten thousand followers, declaring, “We, too, have fans.”

They transformed a bicycle into a self-powered train — a moving campfire on wheels — and rode it through the city streets at night.

And they formed that collective again — I Am a Mistake — to keep doing wrong things in a society obsessed with being right.

He ended by saying, “Maybe this is what a young person’s ideal life looks like.”