When we talked about death, we were also curious about what it means. New Weekly (ID:: new-weekly) herein from the micro-channel public number , Author: Wang, the head of FIG. : “Game of Thrones Season 5”
What does it mean to stand at thirty? A new interpretation is that the “li” established at thirty is the establishment of a will.
Some time ago, a news article about “18-year-old girl making a will and leaving 20,000 yuan for a friend” appeared on Weibo’s hot search. The most common comment in this hot search is: “Understandable, because no one knows which one will come first, tomorrow or unexpected.”
If we can’t talk about death, we have no right to decide our own death. /”Sister’s Guardian”
According to the “2020 China Will Library White Paper” released by the China Will Library, as of December 31, 2020, they have received nearly 70,000 “wills” in the “WeChat Wills” applet. At its peak, the China Wills Bank applet can receive thousands of WeChat wills within one day.
Teenages are beginning to think about death, and young people in their twenties may have begun to face death. When we talked about death, we were also curious about what death means.
And when we make a “will” to deal with the aftermath and mention death again, what do we want to catch and leave behind?
70,000 “wills”, 70,000 lives
“Baby, mom will always love you… Mom wants you to be healthy, safe and happy. Because of the epidemic, I am very afraid, so I decided to make a will. If I can’t go to the Chinese Will Bank, I will record it on WeChat. If so One day my mother had an accident. The house under her name was transferred to your name and owned by you. Your father will take care of the rest.”
This “WeChat Will” was written by a mother who participated in epidemic prevention work. During the epidemic, as a staff member of the neighborhood committee, she “must rush to the front and do a good job of prevention for the residents”, so she left her thoughts about her children in advance.
During the epidemic, some people felt death up close. / Unsplash
Data from the “2020 China Will Bank White Paper” shows that During the most severe period of the new crown epidemic from February to March, the number of people in the country left the most WeChat wills,Everyone is facing “death.” On this topic, many people have even re-understood their own views on life and death.
During the epidemic, tomorrow and accidents do not know which one will come first. People use WeChat wills to convey their emotions. / Chinese Will Bank
My parents died in a traffic accident that year and failed to leave a word for Yao Biyun.
People have blessings and disasters. As a post-90s Yao Biyun, she didn’t want the same regret to happen to her daughter, so she wrote a “WeChat will” to her 3-year-old daughter Wang Siyao. The last sentence of this “will” is: “I love you, you look great when you smile, so remember to smile more.”
Among the nearly 70,000 “WeChat Wills”, most of them are young people. The highest proportion is between 20 and 30 years old, accounting for 38.7%; followed by those under 20 years old, accounting for Compared with 27.4%, many of this group are students.
Not shy about life and death has become the attitude of most young people of this generation towards life. / Chinese Will Bank
Compared with what parents leave behind to their children, young people have more choices for their “wills” to confide in. Some confessed to current, former, secret crush, some wrote to girlfriends and friends, some confessed to parents and so on. It is worth mentioning that 5.44% of people left a letter from the past to their “future self”. The specific content is to encourage and hope that they will be better in the future.
Chen Kai, director of the Management Committee of the China Will Bank, said that the WeChat Will is not a will in the legal sense. Its main function is to express emotional exhortations, entrustments and blessings to family and friends. In fact, the official name of the “WeChat Will” applet is “Happy Message”.
Young people are able to face death directly and incorporate their wills into their life plans. / China Will Bank
Although the “WeChat Will” has no legal effect, it does not hinder our sense of ritual of “going through the process of making a will seriously.”
Some people confess affectionately to their lover and spouse, while others are praying and blessing. Someone carefully writes down their life summary resume, plus words of encouragement to themselves or their relatives and friends. 69.2% of people will attach photos of themselves, their loved ones, and family members to their WeChat wills. There are also many heartbroken people who write the “WeChat Will” as a “diary of a broken love” to record their own mental journey and pay tribute to the lost love.
After you have written the reasons and ideas for making your “will”, you can send this “WeChat Will” to the designated person within a specified time.
Let those secrets that cannot be appealed to the mouth become words that can be retrieved at any time. These “last words” are left to the “us” of the past, and the true feelings wrapped in the heavy shell of the “will” will become the luck of the future “us”.
Or simply, these “wills” will become a little clever in daily life. Just like what this daughter wrote to her mother: “Love you. By the way, my albums, posters, and all kinds of peripherals are in limited quantities. Don’t throw them away by mistake.”
Say goodbye to the past. / American drama “Modern Family”
Unknown death, Yan knows life
At the end of March, scholar Liu Qing published the “2020 Annual Review of Western Thought”. He observed a trend: “The disintegration of the locality of life.”
The locality of life is relatively self-sufficient, and people can generally graspOwn destiny. But in modern society, there are more and more variables that affect our lives, and it is even difficult to control, “complicated to the extent that it is beyond the cognitive ability of ordinary people.”
Liu Qing believes that this actually poses an incalculable risk to many people. It is becoming more and more difficult for us to understand our own situation, let alone grasp our own destiny.
If you want to find your own sense of control over your life, you naturally have a kind of vitality to death. Lu Xiaoya, a psychologist who wrote “Life and Death Lessons in the Video”, said: “Writing a will is a life plan and a process of self-talk. To think about who we are and what we can live into.”
For young people, the will is not only to explain the funeral, but also to force oneself to live to death and plan a limited life.
In an interview report by “China News Weekly”, Yang Yingyi, who works at the Guangdong First Registration Center of the China Wills Bank, had the youngest customer contacted by the 17-year-old Jiawen(alias).
In the first phone call, Yingyi Yang reminded the other party that the testator must be a person with full civil capacity. Jarvan quickly replied to her that although she is under 18 years old, her current source of income is entirely her own labor income.
The childhood Jarvan has been plagued by leukemia. After several setbacks, his condition was controlled, but he was diagnosed with a heart attack. The whole family has been overdrawn, and his father has a hobby of gambling. When his peers are still reading, dating, and playing games, Jarvan has already begun to consider making money for a living.
In the hospital’s ICU, Jarvan has repeatedly witnessed disputes between critically ill family members over treatment and property issues. Thinking of my illness, it may be difficult to accompany my mother until she is old, and she may even leave at any time, “there is a feeling of waiting for me.”
Jarvin’s requirements for the will are very simple, as long as he leaves all the money in his Alipay to his mother. In order to make more money, when leaving the will, Jarvan didn’t even have time to communicate on the specific matters of the will, so he chose to communicate over the phone.
Unlike the elderly who take a morning or even a day to make a will, the shortest time it takes for young people to make a will is 20 minutes. “Before deciding to make a will, they have been mentally prepared. The heirs often only include the’most important person’. At the same time, they also understand that the will can be changed at any time. This is not a one-off sale.” /p>
In the past one or two years, “post-90s and post-00s making wills” can be regarded as a common topic. In 2017, 55 post-90s registered their wills in the China Will Bank; as of the end of 2020, the total number of this group has reached 553.
Young people making a will, in essence, is not a romantic thing chasing trends. Generally speaking, for services such as will consultation, drafting, registration, and custody, the market price of making a will is about 10,000 yuan in total.
According to the “White Paper” statistics, 80% of the post-90s who have made a will have independent housing. The inclusion and arrangement of “virtual properties” is also a prominent feature. Virtual properties such as Alipay, WeChat, QQ, and game accounts are common types of property in post-90s wills, followed by securities funds.
To make a will now is actually responsible and respect for life. / Chinese Will Bank
In other words, for young people floating in the fund ocean, “wills” may also become their new way of managing money. When I presuppose the “lower limit of nothing” for myself, I can have a future with everything I should have.
Confucius’s phrase “I don’t know how to live or know how to die” is actually the same in reverse. In these “death to death” wills, we should see the courage of young people to go to life desperately.
“China has no real death education”
Professor Hu Yian of Guangzhou University is regarded as the first person to “move death education into Chinese university classrooms”.
In order to allow young people to establish a healthier outlook on life and death, and let them have a thorough understanding of life, in 2000, with the support of the school, Hu Yian opened the elective course “Life and Death” for the first time. There is no domestic experience to learn from, Hu Yian developed a set of teaching model by himself, allowing students to feel death by writing wills and epitaphs.
“Life and Death” allows college students to have their own views on life and death. / The broad press team
According to Hu Yian,this course aims to “break the mystery of death and the fear of death.” The content of the course includes near-death experience, attitude towards life and death, hospice care, etc. From the initial number of 30 to 40 people to more than a hundred people, from a small classroom to a stepped classroom, now “Life and Death” is already a well-known online celebrity class.
A student once wrote an “epitaph” for himself in the “Study of Life and Death” class-“My epitaph is: Here lies a man who once had good hopes, and the mans shoes and hats have gone for thousands of years. When you swim in the sky, those who walk along with songs will make me forget things.”
The popularity of “Life and Death” is not accidental. In the fifth season of “Wonderful Flowers”, the topic of one issue was “Do you want to tell TA when you see someone else’s death”.
At the end of this program, Ma Dong’s concluding statement is: “Facing life and death is a lesson that all people in our Chinese culture lack.”
Ma Dong believes that he cannot avoid talking about life and death. / Screenshot of “Qihua Shuo”
The debater Qiu Chen said when he was diagnosed with a malignant tumor plus lymph node metastasis: “I think whether it is the date of death, the serious illness, or all the bad news that we can’t hide in our lives, we are all Only when we see it, face it, and even are willing to talk about it, can we fight it.”
If we can’t talk about death properly, we have no right to decide our own death.
In the novel “Eternal Life”, the Argentine writer Borges wrote: “Except for humans, all living things can live forever. Because they don’t know what death is. Death can make humans smart and sad. They do I am shocked by the dew-like situation. Every action of them may be the last time; every face will disappear as blurry as seen in a dream.”
The small composition left by the musician Zhao Yingjun before his death, many people were touched by his optimistic attitude towards death. / Zhao Yingjun Weibo
People who only indulge in daily life day after day will not realize that every day of life is actually “life toward death.”
“The Common Sense You Must Know About Aging and Death”, this is the subtitle of “The Best Farewell”. The English title of this book is Being Mortal, Mortal means “mortal”. The translator Peng Xiaohua said that she once wanted to translate into “being a mortal” or “a mortal has death”, but she was worried that Chinese readers would have a taboo about “death”, so the final version of the book title might be interpreted as “the setting sun is still good”, which is for others. A kind of reverie and hope.
Compared with this kind of reverie, what we need more is acceptance, which is exactly what the “will” means to us.
Mortals, like us, have to die, and they must die.
In the limited length of life, cherish every opportunity to say goodbye. / Movie “The Later Us”
What we need to do, before this day comes, bid farewell to yesterday’s self, this is the best farewell.
Reference materials
[1] “2020 Chinese Will Bank White Paper”
[2] Young people who made a will: leave the real estate to the mother and the savings to the first love | China News Weekly
[3] Will fever during the epidemic: managing property, but also managing emotions | Southern Weekend
[4] Chinese students are missing one of the most courses and should not be ignored | There is a university
[5] Why has death become the contemporary “elephant in the room”? | NOWNESS now
This article is from WeChat official account:New Weekly (ID: new-weekly) , author: Wang in