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We always hope to "steal" some extra time from the rules, but in fact, going with the flow is more efficient and we don't have to worry about too many accidents.

Written by Chen Tao

Before the release of the movie "Reverse Life" directed by Xu Zheng, more than a dozen WeChat friends sent me posters or introductions and asked: Isn't this you?

I replied: I have never seen a delivery man laugh like the one on the poster. Is this alien science fiction or irony, or just another bowl of hard-to-swallow chicken soup?

My experience is somewhat similar to that of the protagonist: when I was laid off or couldn't find a suitable job, I chose to deliver food as a temporary transition. Of course, the wider group is: they can only deliver food.

I can say responsibly that you won’t make a lot of money from delivering food, but it guarantees that you won’t starve to death.It's terribly inward-looking now, but not as extreme as what's portrayed in the movies - the hero continues to fight for the single king after a car accident. I cursed loudly while sitting in the cinema.

This profession is a metaphor of the current era: the remuneration for time is gradually becoming cheaper, but the number of practitioners is gradually increasing. It has frequent contact with the public but is a strange "neighborhood". The light physical threshold makes the mobility extremely high. People are trapped in the system and cannot move. Even when they "enter the pit", there are intermediaries and equipment industry chains, and there is a certain amount of commission for inviting others to run.

In addition, various incidents involving food deliverymen have also appeared in social news, such as those who rescued people and put out fires, those from Tsinghua University and Peking University, and Shan Wang who earned 1.02 million yuan in three years. Last year, I also stacked up multiple buffs and became a hot topic with the topic of "38-year-old 985 philosophy master's degree former media person unemployed and delivering food."

The biggest reality of cinema movies is that they are a commodity produced through a standard industrial process. And we cannot escape the reality cage that is as hard as steel bars every day. I want to talk about my real experience and what I have seen as a delivery man.

01

The pun of "going against the flow" in life is not quite accurate. Going against the flow or running a red light, after all, in a few cases, impatience is engraved on the deliveryman's face, and he is probably going to exceed the time limit again. I mainly do this at night, when there is a lot of room for operation; it is more difficult to operate in the complex traffic conditions during the day, and it will backfire and be cursed by other car owners and pedestrians.

You can also find reasons to be forced to "go against the flow", since the navigation is like this and it is about to time out.We always hope to "steal" some extra time from the rules, but in fact, going with the flow is more efficient and we don't have to worry about too many accidents.

The male protagonist in "Reverse Life" unexpectedly and accurately combines the "N-piece set" of the middle class: high-leverage mortgage, wife staying at home, children attending international schools, elderly hospitalized, financial products crashing, etc. Netizens questioned the plot: a 45-year-old team leader of a large factory who graduated from Tongji University is not financially independent, but has no savings, no connections to find a job, and is even cheated by a headhunter. The reasonable setting is: the family's expenses are never small, and the mainstay cannot be allowed to collapse.

To be honest, I haven't started a family or bought a house. Beijing is not cost-effective, but I have considered living in my hometown. Now it seems that not getting married or buying a house makes people feel a lot more relaxed. I also happened to experience the financial crisis in 2018. I put my eggs in different baskets, but the result was that even the "car" overturned.

A few years ago, when I was "optimized" by an Internet company, I didn't care. It was easy to find a job as soon as I submitted my resume. I was also happy to start a business with others. I could even stay in my rented house and play games for a few months. I managed to get my game character "Aguduo" into the ranking of Chaoyang District, Beijing.

In the later stage of the epidemic, I suddenly realized why it became so difficult to find a job.At the end of 2022, when the ban was just lifted, I rented a second-hand electric car from a car dealership in Wangjing, rented a replaceable battery from a power station, and started delivering food. I seemed to have discovered a business opportunity to make money. Someone in my circle of friends said that even if I added a 20 yuan delivery fee, no one would deliver ibuprofen.

I was not sure how long I could run, so I chose part-time crowdsourcing, and Shansong is a one-to-one delivery service, which is more suitable for novices. I can imagine that if I accept several orders from several platforms at the same time, I will definitely exceed the time limit.

I carefully calculated the efficiency and made it as efficient as possible. I drove around Wangjing and mainly drove at night because of the nighttime fees and premiums. At the same time, I could also get newbie rewards, full order rewards, holiday rewards, etc., and my comprehensive hourly wage could reach 50 yuan.

The current unit price is 30 yuan per hour,Some netizens told me that even if they are fixed on a large platform, they often "fly solo" and cannot receive more orders. It is obviously more difficult to receive orders for flash delivery, unless nearby users really have urgent items in the same city.

Rather than calling it a "retrograde", it is more accurate to call it a trough, or as reported in the media, "the fall of the middle class".

02

Since I want to do this business, I think I can learn by myself. There is no need to learn from a master or even have a whole book of "shortcut secrets" as shown in movies or on the Internet. Shortcuts can't save a few minutes at all. More time is spent on picking up food, finding a building, climbing stairs, and speeding on the road. No matter how sharp the shortcut is, it is still a curve and cannot beat the straight-line distance calculated by the platform.

The biggest secret is just to run more.

I almost ran based on my mood. I heard that a standard deliveryman has to earn at least 300 yuan a day, which means nearly 10,000 yuan a month. I only tried it once, and I was really tired after running for 10 hours straight. After 12 hours, I reached 320 yuan, and I felt that my heart rate was out of sync. After returning to the cramped rental house, I simply couldn't think about philosophical questions.

Since I "fell", I have lived in Caochangdi Art Village near Wangjing, and even moved to a cheaper house in the village. As I was short of money, I found that the monthly rent of the place I originally rented was 800 yuan more expensive.

Since it is a part-time crowdsourcing, I don't have to punch in and attend meetings every day like full-time site workers, or have to run for 10 hours. The platform has time limit rules. After 8 hours of online orders per day, you will be reminded to take a break, after 10 hours, you will be reminded frequently, and after 12 hours, you will be restricted from taking orders.But this cannot stop the deliverymen from competing internally. With so many platforms, they can switch sides at any time.

From the beginning, I didn’t shy away from telling my family that I often posted on WeChat Moments, and sometimes some former colleagues also sent me messages of concern, but they obviously didn’t mock me like in the movies. Because I posted frequently on WeChat Moments, an ex-girlfriend blocked me. A former colleague in the media said: Brother Tao, I think you can become famous. He was really accurate in his prediction, but that’s another story.

In fact, I have several former colleagues who transferred to a famous food delivery platform because a business segment of the previous Internet company collapsed due to force majeure.

A former colleague said to me: Brother Tao, if you have any questions about the platform, you can tell me directly. I didn't ask in detail, he was probably the product manager of the takeaway business. Another asked me to send my resume, guided me to revise my resume carefully, and recommended me internally. As expected of a product manager, he mainly digitized my previous "strength".

I do know some people in several well-known domestic Internet companies. But I vaguely felt that some of their business units were also laying off employees at the end of 2022. A former colleague said that they had to lay off about one-third of their subordinates, but they couldn't do it. At this time, the first wave of smart people started to do self-media "resigning from a job with a million-dollar annual salary and lying down in Dali".

It was very strange. Some of my former colleagues were using algorithms to "trouble" me as a food delivery driver. They symbolized my previous glamorous work and life. I recalled that when we were smoking downstairs, they talked about how they won the "Hundred Regiments War" of the food delivery platform many years ago. Both sides fought fiercely and even went through difficult offline promotions.

We will become living fossils in the history of Chinese takeout in different ways.

While we were twisting off our cigarettes and going upstairs to work overtime, my former journalist colleague was writing a famous report titled "Food Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System". In the report, a teacher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Sun Ping was also researching food delivery riders. A few years later, in July 2024, this young scholar published the book "Transitional Labor: Food Delivery Riders in the Platform Economy".

03

I decided to browse more recruitment software and download a few more: I would apply everywhere if there was a job opening. No matter how perfect my resume was, people would not even take a look at it. Later, a recruitment software specialist added me and asked: Mr. Chen, the backend shows that you often send out a large number of resumes at 2 a.m., don’t you sleep? I replied: I just came back from delivering food.

My mother called me every now and then to ask if I had found a job. My aunt also called me and told me to go home for the Spring Festival or stop drifting in Beijing and return to Chengdu. I said that there were too many orders around the Spring Festival and it was a time not to be missed. My family sent me Sichuan sausages, which were not spicy at all because my mother's stomach was not good and could not tolerate spicy food.

I was alone in Beijing, feeling cold and enveloped in loneliness and darkness.

During the Spring Festival, I "reluctantly" took on a PR article, which I finished in one day. The price was 10 times the daily salary of a takeaway deliveryman. I thought, I can't write "colorful black" well. This is not better than delivering food. I feel a little bit hot. My impatience is not only written on my face, but also on the cursing mouth of the takeaway deliveryman.

It was indeed a time of explosive orders, because many stores were closed, and takeout orders were concentrated in a few stores. The deliverymen were urging the merchants, and they were about to exceed the time limit again, and filed delay complaints on their mobile phones. Each order can have three 5-minute opportunities. This can be traced back to the improvement measures announced by various platforms quickly after the report "Takeout Riders, Trapped in the System".

I have never seen an "all-powerful" guy go into the kitchen to help cook like in the movies. This is just a joke shot by an internet celebrity named "Hai Yang" a few years ago. It is said online that Hai Yang was tricked by capital and suffered from depression.

Everyone is only concerned about the orders at hand and is not in the mood to keep smiling.This "Operation Smile" is not as exaggerated and sensational as in the movie, and facial recognition is not so stupid that it cannot recognize living people unless it is in a pitch-black environment.

Its previous function was to identify whether the deliveryman was wearing a mask; it has continued to this day after the epidemic, mainly to identify whether the deliveryman is himself, whether he is wearing a helmet and the platform's uniform. "Smile" is just a name for existence.

A guy asked me provocatively in the elevator: How much money did you run today? I said ashamedly, I just came out. He didn't stare at me but swiped his phone: I ran more than 200. I said, I am better at night running. He was dark and thin, just like the stereotype, he hurried out of the elevator, and the phone issued an AI female voice saying "order in". I guess he often clicked the delivery button in advance.

Your takeaway shows up finished, then it tends to go downstairs.

The most common thing I encountered with my fellow comrades was asking about the entrance to the residential complex and the building number. As long as the building was found, the house number was not a problem. The residential complexes in Beijing were like isolated islands, surrounded by walls everywhere. In some communities, it was even impossible to go directly from Area A to Area B in the same community, and one had to find another gate. We would also ask each other about the shops in the mall and the small workshop in the basement.

In an old residential area in Hujialou, it is open and has no gates or security guards. As a "Wangjing player" who is not familiar with this area, I asked an old owner sitting on a stool how to get to a certain building. After asking, he said, "Young man, you can't leave. You forgot something very important." I asked, "What is it?" After a while, he said, "You forgot to say thank you," and explained to me the key points of learning traditional virtues.

I said: I told you, you are probably hard of hearing. He cursed at me in the end, but I was in a hurry to deliver the order. I have only encountered this situation once in my three months of delivering food.

04

There are three real philosophical questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going? The first two questions can be omitted. The security guards stopped me, and most of the time they only stopped the takeaway electric carts under my buttocks. At that time, the SKP shopping mall in Beijing stopped all the takeaways and only let the ordering users come down to pick up the food. In addition, the villa area can usually only be walked a long way.

When this old electric bike came to me, it had been modified. The scale showed a legal 25 mph at most, but in fact it could run at 50 mph. It rushed very fast and fell several times. I have described it before:The car is a wild, no-name brand, and is quite resistant to falling, which fits my wild and broken life very well.

In contrast, the security guards seemed lifeless, listless in the afternoon, and even hung their heads when it got dark. It was hard to tell whether they were pretending to sleep or really sleeping. This year, it is possible that they were obsessed with watching melodramatic online short dramas, in which the male protagonists were often not walking against the flow, but defying the will of heaven and changing their fate. Since I usually run at night, some security guards were already fast asleep in the pavilion, and I couldn't wake them up even if I yelled at them, so I just climbed over the railing.

I also climbed over the wall several times because I couldn’t find the main door or the building number was just opposite the wall. I had to walk around the perimeter for three minutes and then walk for five minutes to get downstairs. I deeply felt that:Defense and security are themselves a kind of wall, standing just a stone's throw away.I didn’t want to steal anything at all, and I could never have guessed that a month later, tens of thousands of netizens would witness a philosophical delivery man named “Master Chen” shedding tears in a live broadcast room. He seemed to have lost his life and all his previous transcripts.

It’s not scary to go against the flow, just let the guy walk.

I understand that I need to build a good relationship with the security guards. Once, there was a handsome young man who drove a motorcycle in front of me to find the building. He was like a Hong Kong movie. He was fully armed and his motorcycle was huge. He asked me to remember the way back after I was there. The way was a little roundabout, but it didn't matter, at least I got there.

Every time I leave the community, I light a cigarette, as if to let out a sigh of relief. Sometimes, I smoke with the security guard standing outside the pavilion. Then, it is natural to return to the second philosophical question: where are you from? We also chatted, asking each other how long we have been in this business and how much money we can make per month.

The security guard said, "I might as well be a food delivery guy. Actually, I've thought about it. You guys look so tired." I said, "I can take you flying." He actually downloaded the food delivery crowdsourcing app.

He took a puff of his cigarette and said: Come on, you look so gentle, you should just find another white-collar job. He also explained his previous obstruction:If someone allows an electric bike to enter the residential area, he will be fined 500 yuan by the property management company for the first time, and will be fired if it happens three times. There must be cameras installed at the entrance of the residential area.

The winter in Beijing is very cold and biting. The security guard curled up his hands. He was probably more prone to frostbite than me.

Delivering food during the day and working as a security guard to stop food deliverymen at night, this kind of joke is common on the Internet and also appeared in the recent movie "Reverse Life". I hope to "make dumplings together" with the security guards. These two professions tend to have a group of people, and they are getting younger and younger. "Lucky Three Treasures" and "Triathlon" are probably circulated.

05

But since March last year, I have clearly felt a large influx of delivery guys in the food delivery industry. After the explosion of orders on Women's Day, it has become difficult for me to receive orders for express delivery. When I opened several crowdsourcing apps, I found some "junk orders", which are those that require walking a long way or climbing stairs. My iPhone is not "jailbroken" and cannot be installed with plug-ins to grab orders.

When I was delivering food, I was indeed using an iPhone, wearing Vans shoes, Adidas pants, a down jacket worth over a thousand dollars, and a MUJI sweater, scarf and gloves, and then I would go home and open my Apple computer.In fact, these are all very old white-collar products that have been passed down from the past.

I couldn't get any takeout orders, my resumes were always ignored, my landlord was asking for rent, my family was urging me to return to Chengdu, and after applying for the positions of Taoist priest and intern to no avail, I was starting to feel the pressure grow.

I am a philosophy major, and I happen to be studying Taoism, but the Taoist priests in Qingcheng Mountain are required to be under 35 years old. I recorded a 2-minute video and posted it online. I lay at home all day watching short videos and had no mood to eat.

At 7pm the next day, the number of comments on the short video suddenly increased. When there were more than a hundred comments, I was sensitively aware that I might become famous. I jumped out of bed, set up my phone, and clicked on the live broadcast. In the live broadcast room, the voice calling "Master Chen" made me dizzy. I was a little unprepared. It was almost magical.

But thinking about it afterwards, with so many layers of buffs, it is almost impossible not to touch the nerves of the public in the context of the times.Big data is captured everywhere, and the algorithm has scooped me up. Should I cry or laugh?I paid the rent the next day.

It took me a whole week to read through tens of thousands of private messages and more than 100,000 comments. During this period, former colleagues I interviewed came, and several documentary filmmakers also came.

Later, I stopped drifting in Beijing and returned to Chengdu.

I climbed the steps of Qingcheng Mountain, wanting to visit the old Taoist priest. But he refused to see me, saying that he was in poor health and needed to meditate. It was thanks to my hot search that I asked someone to convey my sincere apologies, expressed my views on traditional culture, and said that I wanted to repay my family and society and work hard to live a good secular life.

I have come to realize that I, who am already 39 years old, may not be able to live a good life in this secular world. The first philosophical question: Who am I? I often can't remember who I am, maybe I have gone too far.

After returning to Chengdu, I sent my resume to many schools. In March this year, I started working at a private university in Xi'an, teaching journalism. From doing journalism, to becoming a journalist, and finally teaching journalism, it is also a kind of homecoming.

I don’t want my life to go “backwards” for too long, I want to live a smoother life.

When I was on the hot search, a netizen left a message in the comment area: No matter how I live, my heart will not die. I also hope that the platform will not lower the unit price of food deliverymen, and take less commission from merchants, so that brothers can have a full meal, thank you.