Reject living a fragmented life (translation)
The following is a translation of "拒绝碎片化生活" by Liu Miao.
If you go to the antique market of Jingdezhen city in Jiangxi, China, you will see a peculiar wonder: many of the stalls sell not whole, but fragmented porcelain pottery. This sight is likely unique to Jingdezhen, a city known for porcelain -- not even in the pottery capital of Yixing have I seen a market that sells pottery fragments this way.
You can find the answers to the mystery by visiting the local museums. Many of the pottery exhibits are constructed out of fragments. Pottery of this kind is fragile on their own, and imperial porcelain of only minor imperfections in ancient Guan Ware would also be manually destroyed during the Song dynasty, which means vast amounts of recoverable fragments were left for posterity. If you can find a somewhat complete set of fragments, you can put them together and recover a valuable artifact. The restoration of porcelain fragments is a highly sophisticated craft.
These fragments shouldn't be very expensive -- they should at least be cheaper than the that of a complete pottery. They are present in the market to cater to the opportunism mindset -- with the low price of collecting the bits and pieces, you might possibly be buying a highly valuable artifact.
Similar opportunist thinking can be found in every industry. With "gambling stones" in Yunnan and Myanmar, buyers try to obtain jade at the price of stones; those in calligraphy markets attempt to buy celebrity calligraphy treasures with the price of waste paper. Powerball tickets, even, are essentially the possibility of obtaining millions from guessing a set of numbers with just a few dollars. It all requires luck.
Naturally, there are a few advantages to these fragments. Apart from the low prices, it's a lot more portable compared to complete porcelain -- for both the buyer and the seller -- it's easier to store and transport and there is no need to be as careful as handling usual pottery. Despite these benefits, most people aren't very interested in buying fragmented porcelain. After all, the difficulty in reassembling the pieces isn't very different from the chances of winning the Powerball tickets.
Although there are very few people who are willing to accept broken items, even less wish to actively break things. But strangely, most people are quite happy to slice up time in their daily lives in hopes of doing more in limited time.
Like those broken porcelain pieces, fragmented time have their own advantages. First, they are "cheap" -- easy to obtain. For many people, it's hard to reserve two hours of their time to watch a complete movie, yet it's easy to spend ten minutes on a short-form video platform to watch explainers and break-downs for the movie; it's hard to block one hour a day to finish a book in a week, but they're able to watch short-form content-creators talk about the views and ideologies presented in the book again and again; it may be difficult for them to write a somewhat long-form article, but they are willing to use fragmented time to post short "fragments of life" on social media platforms.
Another benefit of these time slices is their portability just like those porcelain pieces. The advent of modern smartphones reinforced this advantage: whether it's time spent waiting for the bus, or the time in-between riding the subway, it's always possible to quickly make use of that time and watch a quick movie break-down, or watch a vlogger express a view. This gave people a delusion: they're making good use of the slices of time.
You can visit the antique market every week and buy a pile of porcelain fragments at the price of recyclable waste, but if you do this for a lifetime and not be able to reconstruct a single complete pottery, you've only collected piles of broken pieces for a lifetime. Likewise, if you spend the time of your whole life collecting fragmented information, at the end of the day it's all still a pile of fragmented pieces. And thus, making good use of your time by collecting debris is still a form of delusion.
Perhaps there is no shortage of boutique in these fragmented contents -- maybe you'll find ancient relics from the Ming or Qing dynasties by chance in Jingdezhen, but their yield rate is simply too low. You never know how many bags of porcelain fragments you need to collect just to get a single piece of Blue-white pottery. You never know how many mentally stimulating yet petty and dispensable short-form videos you have to scroll through before you find something of real value.
It may be good, but it is only a broken piece, you must assemble many of these pieces into a complete artifact to show its worth. To collect all the necessary pieces to form a complete work from products of such low yield rates is near-impossible.
I used to be a player of these pieces myself.
I signed up on X (formerly known as Twitter) the year it was launched and used my fragments of time to publish carefully crafted tweets. Only a few years later, I was among the top most followed Chinese users -- all achieved without posting any political content. My boss later allowed me to be in charge of internet operations without relevant work experience. In retrospect, although it feels like the time I'd spent were only fragmented pieces, all of those fragments added together actually amounted to quite a lot. But after all these years, other than a very attractive follower count, it doesn't seem like I've created something that feels like a complete work of art.
I've been sending books to friends recently. I realized I still have a lot of what might soon disappear: magazines. This form of media was very popular when the internet wasn't as prominent. But because it's all made of fragments of content, it is experiencing a complete and utter defeat in the race against the internet. "Magazines" might soon be a word of the past.
Magazines are fragmented forms of books. It's hard to even send it away as gifts. You can share a vase to a friend, perhaps they will accept your gift, but who will send broken pieces as gifts? As for the fate of those magazines -- I'll probably dispose of them in the recycle bin.
Magazines can be seen as the short-form videos from the age of print media. With magazines, you can easily try different topics without much effort -- if you don't like an article, you can quickly "scroll" to the next one. Each magazine is run by a professional team -- there is funding, editing, and naturally the yield rate can be even higher than the fragments on the internet. But you can't piece them together as a completed work -- at the end of the day, they can only be broken pieces.
With all the completed work we have, why choose the fragments?
Is watching ten movie break-downs on YouTube Shorts really worth the same as watching ten movies? For vases, there are definitely several determining factors that define its age -- its pattern and signature design, for instance -- but it's tough to say that you've seen the entire vase when you've only looked at a fragment with its signature pattern. Videos such as "watch this movie in 10 minutes" are no different: presented by extracting the essential signature pieces from the movie with the consistent pace of storytelling and character names and even the same background music.
When I was learning English, I once bought a "Bookworm" collection from Cambridge. All the books have a green cover, they present simplified versions of literary classics in a form that can be read by middle-schoolers to help improve their English. The Robinson Crusoe version I read was one of them. The reading experience completely ruined my impression of the story. I guess it's really difficult for the simplified version to convey the charm and nuances of the original.
If you really wanted to, any classic can be simplified. Even massive works such as In Search of Lost Time can be summarized in a single sentence: thoughtful recollections of a child of the high society. That said, I rarely see cases where someone reads the summary as substitute for the whole book. To be frank, I have never read Dream of the Red Chamber or In Search of Lost Time, because both are extensive and completing it all requires quite a lot of time. However, even if there are decent summaries that can significantly reduce reading time, I remain uninterested -- like watching a movie in 10 minutes, what may appear to be a timer saver is actually a form of wastage.
Other than putting out the stalls, the daily routine of the vendors of the antique market involves mostly collecting broken items and then putting them for sale in the market. I have decided to reject this kind of fragmented life of collecting those broken pieces: to neither consume, nor produce them.
There no longer any apps for fragmented content on my phone -- whether that be TikTok, Twitter, or Weibo -- and I've long since stopped spending time on this kind of content. Although I haven't yet completely refrained from production -- I will still post content on Bluesky occasionally, and in hopes of making the content not seem so fragmented, I would try to make maximum use of the character limit (300 characters). For now, the content centers around movie reviews.
Theoretically, abstaining from producing fragmented content will leave out extra time, and I try to make use of this time to produce more completed content. Producing completed work requires a lot more time. Like how a complete porcelain from Jingdezhen requires 72 steps to make, producing completed content requires no less of continual polishing and refinement. This certainly isn't easy, but I believe it will all be worth it in the end. As for how the completed product fares, I can only reflect on that next year.