A generation shining on the ice
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
These past few days, because my daughter has taken an interest in skating, I've been watching Winter Olympic figure skating with her over the holidays.
I was only there to keep her company, but a small moment caught me.
When Alysa Liu won the title, the first thing she did was run over and hug Japanese skater Ami Nakai. As someone from the "uncle generation", I genuinely froze for a second.
Because in the sports stories of my era, the arena was clear-cut. Either you win or I lose. If you're not my opponent, you're my enemy.
But the young people in front of me, in their teens and twenties, didn't have that tight, win-or-lose look on their faces. What I saw was pure happiness. They were competing hard, but enjoying it too. It was lovely, and very unfamiliar.
Choosing to come back
Afterwards I couldn't resist looking up Alysa Liu's background, and her life turns out to be very much of its time. Her father was a Tiananmen protester who eventually made his way to the US and became a lawyer. To develop his gifted daughter, he reportedly invested around US$500,000 over the years. She became famous very young, won titles everywhere, and then at 16 suddenly announced her retirement.
The reason wasn't complicated: too much pressure, and her life had disappeared.
What's more interesting is that a few years later, she came back to the ice. But this time she wasn't being pushed forward. She chose to come back. She started deciding her own choreography and her own diet, resting when she felt tired, and off the ice she's friends with skaters from different countries.
At this point a book I'd read came straight to mind: iGen.
The book says this generation is more tolerant and less rebellious, but also more prone to anxiety. They're less attracted to risk, more practical about work, and pay more attention to their own feelings.
When I read that before, it was "knowing that this is a thing". This time, I saw it with my own eyes on the ice.
Our generation still holds most of the economic resources and the loudest voice today. But there's one field where the generational handover has clearly already happened: sport. Physical vitality and emotional expression can't fake it.
You'll notice that many young athletes today no longer wear that grim, bitter tension on their faces. Instead there's a lightness, like they're in a state of flow.
It feels a lot like hearing Jay Chou for the first time twenty years ago. Many people couldn't get used to him back then, but slowly, a whole generation's taste was rewritten.
Consumers are changing generations too
Recently, while building user personas, I've been feeling the same shift more and more strongly. For a long time we assumed "cheap is king": scale first, speed first, and as long as you could grow fast, many problems could be dealt with later.
But now things seem a bit different.
More and more consumers are starting to care about things that used to be ignored. Emotional value matters more, quality is being taken seriously again, and brands pushed up purely by capital aren't having as easy a time as before.
Many brands used to follow a very similar path: chase scale first, then talk about brand, and finally work hard to lift themselves "upmarket".
This generation of users is actually very sensitive. They don't necessarily want the most expensive thing, but they can easily feel whether a brand is taking them seriously, whether it has taste, whether it has warmth.
Over the past year or two, looking at business, at AI and at how consumption is structured, I've found that although AI will hugely raise efficiency, what really gets amplified may well be the things that already have a human touch.
Am I anxious about the future?
If you only look at the macro environment, of course it's not easy, and the market really is changing. But that day, watching those young people shine on the ice, I felt something very grounded.
What I saw wasn't a more cut-throat generation, but young people who started asking earlier, "why am I doing this?"
If the future is gradually handed over to them,
honestly, I'm looking forward to it.