This is the ninety-ninth day of writing every day, and the title I had planned is 'idol baggage.' There is a logic behind it.
I have looked hard at the person I used to be, and I was someone with heavy idol baggage. I was extremely careful about my image. Fortunately, the internet of that time did not require the kind of personal-brand maintenance that today's platforms demand. I belonged to an early generation that got online; when my family was still using dial-up, I was already wandering through strange chat rooms. To keep people from discovering I was a primary-school kid, I worked hard to pass myself off as an adult.
At that time I was doing a kind of information translation. I kept up an entertaining pen-pal relationship with an adult while still a child. I would translate his observations, his understanding of things, and the funny things that happened to him into another version, keep the core of the story, and dress that borrowed identity up as another identity to talk with people online. That was probably when I began to enjoy collecting other people's experiences and retelling them as first-person stories. The pleasure looks a little twisted now, but I could not stop enjoying it.
Because of this odd persona, I became a spiritual leader to a small group of people. My experiences seemed interesting, my life seemed varied, and I could use plain, direct sentences to summarize life lessons that many adults had disguised in obscure language. Fortunately, there were fewer people who argued for sport back then. Everyone could express an opinion online. Cliques existed, but people did not yet feel compelled to attack someone else's understanding. Conflicts of belief were normal; the audience had the power to choose which view to accept. My fake-idol episode did not end because I was exposed. It ended because people's understanding does not stay on one level. Those early fans quickly found more interesting people. Once I was no longer treated as an idol, my urge to create seemed to drain away, and collecting other people's stories lost much of its fun. Another important reason was that I was slowly approaching the age I had pretended to be. If I took off the disguise, it would inevitably create a sensory contradiction and opposition between me and my former self.
As the internet developed, personality was broken up across different apps, different needs, and different functions. The idol identity that needed maintaining was scattered, so the cost of maintaining it naturally rose. The internet is also different now. A person can become an idol very quickly and be forgotten very quickly. An idol identity carefully managed over time can be criticized, or even socially executed, because of one tiny flaw. This is a paradox: the more you want to be an idol to many people, the more traffic and attention you need; and the more traffic you get, the lower the tolerance for flaws. A small defect can be the thing that destroys an idol.
That is also why I put 'idol baggage' at number 99. I do not like idols who are wrapped in perfection. They are almost full-marks existences, but they feel too false—like gods who never fart or shit, held high in the sky. Ninety-nine feels like an idol's critical point. One point more, and they will be dragged down from the altar, while people wait for a new god to be handed an oracle. Idols are made by fans and destroyed by fans. After a certain threshold, fans would rather see the god they created destroyed. From 1 to 100 is the order of making a god, and also the countdown to destroying one.
The more pitiful ones are those whom nobody helps but who still try to push themselves onto the altar. They use their own god-making method to live in a world where they alone are god. This kind of idol is easy to find—on WeChat Moments, Weibo, blogs, everywhere—yet it is also reasonable, because it is a mode of survival. If they stopped believing they were the god of their world, they would lose their pursuit of life.
So I do not think there is any need to argue with these idols, or gods, about their existence and understanding. They will certainly spread their oracles and publish their views. To distinguish themselves from ordinary people, they will even hate for the sake of hating and love for the sake of loving. What others love is a mob to them; what a minority loves, they force themselves to love. They casually summarize themselves everywhere, but what they really want is for others to see that they exist. When they let go with apparent indifference, they have already imagined countless deserved fates for other people.
These gods will not be pushed off the altar, but their world will grow dim for lack of an audience—until that world no longer needs such a fake god either.
I will end with a line from Guo Degang: the precondition for cherishing your feathers is that you are an eagle. If you are just a feather duster, don't bother.