I once stayed in a top-tier class at a high school in a fifth-tier small city. The students there were very good at solving problems and learned early on how to read people's faces: who regressed this time, who bought new study materials, and who claimed they didn't review but scored high anyway. Everyone sat in the same classroom on the surface, but in their hearts, they were already distanced by rank.
What made me most uncomfortable back then was the tension between people. Materials had to be hidden, efforts had to be disguised, and no matter how good the relationship was, one didn't dare to fully open up. A single exam could make friends feel awkward because everyone could potentially squeeze out someone else's position.
At that time, we rarely discussed what kind of person we wanted to become. The goals were already written for us: get into top universities like Tsinghua or Peking University, go to Beijing or Shanghai, find a decent job, and buy a car and a house. As long as you kept running forward, you didn't have to answer "what do I really want."
As long as the scores are still rising, "who I am" can be postponed indefinitely.
What I mean by "hollow," where exactly is the emptiness?
"Hollow person" is not a clinical diagnosis, and I don't want to use it to label students in a certain region. What I call "East Asian-style education" refers to a logic we are all familiar with: using a few quantifiable indicators to rank people, and then tying that ranking to further education, resources, decency, and even love and respect.
People who grow up in this logic may be very capable, have great resumes, and do well in their jobs. Their difficulties appear after the external labels are taken away: without rankings, without performance reviews, without a new identity to show others, can they still confirm their own value? When there is no standard answer in front of them, do they know how to choose?
I used to simply attribute the malice, comparison, and alienation among classmates to "people having problems," and even couldn't help but want to label a group of people as NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). Later, I slowly saw that there were real injuries in those memories, as well as emotional attributions after becoming an adult. That environment rewards defensiveness and competition, but it cannot diagnose everyone for us.
This is also why some "friendships" from that time are not healthy when looking back years later. Intimacy requires the courage to expose vulnerability, while competition requires everyone to control information and hide their cards. If a person is always worried about being surpassed, a friend's good news might be heard as a sentence against themselves. They may not truly want the other person to fail; it's just that they no longer know how to feel safe when others succeed.
The question really worth asking is why so many originally different children eventually learned to value themselves with the same ruler.
When there is only one visible road in a place
In small cities with limited cultural capital, exams are indeed the most trusted path for many families. Parents don't know how to help their children through trial and error, and there aren't many industries, professions, or lifestyles for them to see. Scores are at least public and intuitive; doing well really can be exchanged for a ticket to a larger city. So I don't want to deny the fair value of exams, let alone mock those families who can only fight for scores.
For schools and teachers, scores are also the easiest result to deliver. Whether a student has begun to understand themselves cannot be seen in next semester's report; however, if they improve by a few places in a monthly exam, it can immediately become the teacher's performance, the school's good news, and the parents' reassurance. When everyone is assessed by the same number, they easily push the child toward that number together. There doesn't even need to be a villain here; everyone just needs to be responsible for their own small segment of indicators.
The problem is that a narrow road has gradually become the entire map of life. Exams can be used to screen certain abilities, but they cannot answer for a person: what are they curious about, what kind of cooperation are they good at, what are they willing to endure boredom for, and what kind of life are they prepared to lead.
Exam-taking ability is, of course, a real ability; it requires memory, focus, planning, and pressure resistance. But it is only a small part of a person. I later met many people who were not good at exams back then; they were sensitive to people's feelings, could create something from nothing, and could constantly adjust in situations without standard answers. These abilities had almost no place on the report cards of those years.
The deepest impact of an evaluation system is that it makes people gradually lose sight of abilities outside the ruler.
Why do we forget right after the exam, yet keep "testing" after leaving school?
When I studied liberal arts in high school, there was a lot of content in history, politics, and geography that required memorization. At that age, I didn't have much life experience, so many concepts could only be remembered as materials for answering questions. It's not surprising to forget them after the exam because that knowledge hadn't yet developed a relationship with my own experience. Many years later, when I had truly experienced the pull of work, interests, organizations, and human nature, some of the words I had memorized for the first time began to grow meaning.
Learning should originally include understanding, questioning, and trial and error. When scores become the most important deliverable, students naturally choose the safest strategy: guess what the question-setter wants, skillfully write it out, and try not to expose the self that might lose points. With long-term training like this, people become very good at responding to requirements but not necessarily good at discovering problems.
A more hidden layer is that students gradually treat their real confusion as noise. The classroom doesn't need them to ask "what does this have to do with me"; it only needs them to remember how it will be tested. Over time, "I can't figure it out" is no longer a starting point worth pursuing, but rather feels like proof of falling behind. People express what is correct but express what is real less and less.
This kind of training also enters a person's self-evaluation. When grades are good, teachers are more pleasant and parents are more relieved; when grades drop, the surrounding atmosphere changes. A child easily learns from this: only if I perform well enough am I worthy of being seen.
Psychology calls this state "conditional self-worth." It can drive people to work hard in the short term, but the price is that both success and failure begin to shake one's overall judgment of oneself. Doing poorly on a test isn't just about not doing well this time; it's "I'm no good." Stopping to rest isn't just the body needing recovery; it's "I'm degenerating."
What I really find hard to quit is only daring to admit I have value when I'm winning.
For a long time in my adult life, I couldn't separate "who I am" from grades, achievements, and labels. The school rankings were gone, but new rankings were quickly added: company, salary, position, house, and even the number of followers on social platforms. On the surface, we have graduated, but the student inside waiting for the results to be posted has never left the school.
This student interprets rest as falling behind, converts interests into utility first, and immediately looks for the next proof when work is going well. He can endure hardship but finds it hard to distinguish which hardships lead to where he wants to go and which are just to avoid being considered a failure by others. Long-term tension can even be packaged as self-discipline because once he stops, he has to face that long-postponed question alone.
Many people have choices in their hands but haven't practiced the muscle needed for making choices. From choosing a major to finding a job, every step has a social ranking table that can replace internal judgment. But truly important life decisions happen to have no unified answer: whether to get married, whether to leave a decent job, what kind of people to build relationships with, and what kind of life one is willing to give up another possibility for.
AI makes this problem even more glaring
AI certainly cannot solve all problems in education; it might even make speculation, perfunctoriness, and feeding standard answers easier. But it has already made an old problem hard to avoid: if a person has undergone more than ten years of training and is still best at receiving clear tasks, looking for standard answers, and optimizing output according to scoring rules, then these are precisely the things machines are becoming increasingly good at.
What people need to practice more is deciding what problems are worth solving, judging whether an answer is credible, and knowing what consequences they are willing to bear. These abilities are inseparable from a person who has preferences, boundaries, and can be responsible for their choices. A person who only waits for scoring standards will find it hard to turn AI into their own tool and will more easily be led away by the smooth answers it provides.
Re-parenting yourself
The so-called "awakening" usually doesn't have a dramatic moment. Resigning, traveling, or changing a lifestyle might just be replacing old rankings with new ones. Subjectivity is more like a set of small, somewhat clumsy exercises.
Do something that cannot be written into a resume and see if you still like it when there is no return. Make a small decision without asking others what they think, and then bear the inconvenience it brings. When failing, state the facts accurately: I didn't do this thing well, which doesn't mean my whole self has no value. Also, build a few relationships that don't rely on mutual comparison to be maintained, where you practice exposing imperfections and learn to let down your guard against others' success.
After walking out, a person can still work hard and be ambitious. The change is that achievements begin to serve the life they recognize; they no longer need to exchange every achievement for a proof of existence. They will also fail, be jealous, and be lost, but these moments are no longer enough to sentence the value of the entire person.
None of these things will immediately bring decent results, which is why they are hard. We spent more than ten years learning how to look outward for answers, so of course, it will take a long time to hear that very faint internal voice again.
I am no longer in contact with most of my high school classmates, and I have no way of knowing how they are doing today. The only thing I can be sure of is the traces left on myself: that education gave me the ability to move upward, but it also left me not knowing how to place myself when not moving upward for many years.
Getting a certificate only completes the graduation from school. Another slower graduation happens when a person can finally confirm themselves without relying on rankings and can say to a choice that has no standard answer: this is the path I want to take, and I am willing to bear its cost.
