The "Jiahao" meme has been very popular lately; even without scrolling through Douyin, I feel like I'm being flooded by this term. After understanding what it means, I sighed with relief that I'm old.

In junior high and high school, I was the type of person who liked to talk back to teachers during class. I changed the wallpapers on classroom computers and played music during breaks—I did all those things. So, looking back now, I imagine quite a few people must have hated me. As a class representative, I used evening self-study sessions to play movies in class, and I even picked a bunch of terrible ones. I got hold of the final exam answers for classmates who wanted to choose liberal arts, which ended up spreading throughout the school and causing a re-examination. Dissatisfied with school orders, I once used hydrochloric acid with friends in the middle of the night to corrode a padlock and left a note signed "The Black Rose Knights."

Writing in the snow on snowy days, giving poems to people at graduation, suddenly doing a fadeaway jump shot while walking down the street...

Looking at it now, I am a "Jiahao" through and through.

But there were also many people who liked me. We were chased by security guards late at night, and everyone kept it a secret and didn't sell me out. Our League of Legends team was called "Knights." We craved freedom, we self-proclaimed justice, we refused to be tamed, we were stubborn and incorrigible—we were fifteen or sixteen years old.

Fifteen or sixteen-year-olds naturally possess more thoughts than at any other age; they are colliding and growing. But kids today seem to be colliding with something they can't overcome. If I were in this era, everything I mentioned above would cease to exist, and the individual would collapse into an image: "The Jiahao from the next class." From being different as a sin, to standing out as a sin, and eventually even expressing oneself as a sin, the crowd regresses into numb spectators.

My hands are full of labels stuffed by the internet: Jiahao, ACG fan, meme kid, little pink, small-town test-taker. It only takes a label to understand a person, and people are being labeled in this environment. But if that's the case, how can a person be both ordinary and confident?

Excellent people shine, and mediocre people applaud. If our environment is only meant to make children realize the shittiness and cruelty of society earlier, it's just too fucking stupid.