With what to face the suffering? This is the literary answer
Man is an animal that lies to itself
I think the 1970s is a valuable spiritual treasure for us, as do some of my peers. The youth of the seventies were very different from the youth of today, more enthusiastic, simpler, more disciplined, less demanding of life and more unlucky. To be one of these people is an extraordinary privilege, and these feelings are the same as others. I categorically disagree with those who consider this experience to be a sublime feeling, and consider it pathological. Like Orwell, let's think about what one plus one equals two. The 1970s was a very painful time for most Chinese people. Many young people make great self-sacrifice, and the sacrifice is worthless. With those things in mind, let's talk about the sublime. Taking the 1970s as an example, I think there are two types of nobility. One is the nobility of the time, when leaders called on us to bear hardships in the countryside, saying it was an honor. There is another sublime, the sublime of the present, which we ourselves feel sublime after all the suffering and self-sacrifice we have endured. I think this latter sublime is easier to articulate. Freud had the following explanation for masochism: if people live in a kind of pain that they cannot change, they will fall in love with the pain as a pleasure in order to make themselves feel better. To generalize this a little, one might think: Man is an animal that deceives itself. We have suffered a lot of useless hardships and wasted many years, so some people want to say that this experience is noble. The thought made him feel better, so it had some good effect. Unfortunately, it also has some bad effects: some people believe that one must achieve greatness by taking useless pains and wasting one's years. This kind of thinking is not only harmful, it is sick.