In modern society there is a great deal of argument about competition. Some value it highly, believing that it is responsible for social progress and prosperity（繁荣）. Others say that competition is bad; that it sets one person against another; that it leads to unfriendly relationship between people.

I have taught many children who held the belief that their self-worth relied on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-and-death affairs. In their single-minded pursuit of success, the development of many other human qualities is sadly forgotten.

However, while some seem to be lost in the desire to succeed, others take an opposite attitude. In a culture which values only the winner and pays no attention to the ordinary players, they strongly blame competition. Among the most vocal are youngsters who have suffered under competitive pressures from their parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by not trying to win or achieve success. By not trying, they always have an excuse: “I may have lost, but it doesn’t matter because I really didn’t try.”What is not usually admitted by themselves is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, that would mean a lot. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly, this belief is the same as that of the true competitors who try to prove themselves. Both are based on the mistaken belief that one’s self-respect relies on how well one performs in comparison with others. Both are afraid of not being valued. Only as this basic and often troublesome fear begins to dissolve（缓解）can we discover a new meaning in competition.

The Advice Gap

Advice My Parents Gave Me: Go to college and major in what you love.

Advice I Will Give My Kids: Go to college only if you’ll major in science, engineering, or money. It’s a depressing job market, and majoring in English literature or anything with the word English in it has been useless since 1910s.

My Parents: Never show up to a party empty-handed.

Me: Never show up to a party. Send a text to the host twenty minutes before the party starts to say that you’re “sooooooo sorry” to cancel but your stomach is feeling “weird”.

My Parents: To find a job, walk into the offices of ABC News’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and ask for one.

Me: Apply to jobs via LinkedIn, Zip-Recruiter, or your connections. Write a cover letter and attach your résumé, then manually enter the same information through the company’s portal, which looks as though it were designed in Microsoft Paint. Do this twenty times a day for two years, and you’re bound to make it to a third round of phone interviews before getting ghosted.

My Parents: Learn the difference between a 401(k) (an employer-sponsored defined-contribution pension account) and a Roth I. R. A. (a special retirement account) so that you can start investing early.

Me: Learn the difference between a 401(k) and a Roth I. R. A. so that you can explain it to me.

My Parents: Never wait to do your taxes.

Me: If you wait long enough to do your taxes, there might be a global crisis that forces the federal government to extend the deadline: Then you can wait some more and do them right before the new deadline.

My Parents: Work hard so you can save for retirement.

Me: Retirement is something you’ll read about in your history books under the title “Abstract Ideas”.

My Parents: When we’re gone, look after your siblings and never fight with them over money!

Me: When I’m gone, clear my browser history. Don’t quarrel with your siblings over who gets my monthly ten-cent payments from Medium (an American online publishing platform).

“One, two, three, post the product links!” “Please press the button and give us a thumb-up” “exactly!” the “vibe group,” which means a group of people who are pumping some life into live-streaming and coordinating with live streamers to help steer customers to buy products. The group, also referred to as the “E-commerce straight man/crosstalk” by Chinese users, has stirred a craze in recent weeks on Chinese media platforms.

For the “E-commerce crosstalk” or people who help live streamers to sell their merchandise, it is their specialization. However, others believe that this is confusing to consumers.

The “E-commerce crosstalk” is also known as the center control of the live stream. The work of the center control spans across the pre, mid and post-stage of the live stream, and needs to be responsible for equipment debugging (调试), backstage operation, maintenance of the live stream order, data review and other contents.

They usually create a warming vibe to help live streamers sell products such as “I want 100k likes, could you guys help me to get them, please”, “Post product links!”, “Repost!” or “Let’s join the fan club”. These are normal psychological suggestions for customers which don’t break any of the rules of how to conduct business.

While the “E-commerce crosstalk” group doesn’t just control tempo, they also have another important role — they create a sense of exigency for customers, making them buy now, such as “My friends, the last one! Hurry, buy it now!” “How many are left? No, almost out of stock, only 30 left!” “Buy more today! Hurry up my friends! Go to the yellow cart, find the 1st link! Great price, great quality!”

“These practices are creating an illusion (错觉) of inventory constraints to mislead customers,” Fan Xiaolin, a Beijing-based lawyer told us. The unrealistic atmosphere created by the “E-commerce crosstalk” can easily mislead consumers, causing them to make irrational purchases. The 2020 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report shows that the average return rate of live e-commerce is as high as 30 percent to 50 percent, which is much higher than the traditional e-commerce return rate of 10 percent to 15 percent.