A 40-year-old man falls in the snow. It looks like an ordinary, embarrassing moment for a ride-hailing driver, but the truly striking part is this: it’s not an isolated case of “grassroots hardship,” but rather the shared reality forced upon an entire generation of urban middle class as the social structure sinks. No matter what you’ve done before or what degree you hold, once your industry stalls, positions shrink, or your cash flow breaks, you’ll quickly slide into the same track of trading physical labor and time for money, with almost no buffer to slow your descent.

The greatest contrast is not that the poor are getting poorer, but that the middle class is quietly falling. The career paths they once considered stable, respectable, and sustainable are now being squeezed by manufacturing stagnation, service sector saturation, and the casualization of corporate employment. Hard work no longer guarantees safety, experience no longer represents value—it’s as if the entire structural ceiling is lowering, pushing all middle-aged people toward the same exit.

What’s even more absurd is that the colder the industry, the more it’s crowded with highly educated and professionally qualified people. They didn’t choose this actively; it’s just that the only threshold for these jobs is “can you start right away?” The city sorts people by efficiency, not by résumé. Who you were in the past doesn’t matter—what matters is whether you can get through today’s shift. Thus, people from different classes are scattered, flattened, and ultimately flow toward the same survival threshold.

The deepest helplessness for adults is this: after falling, their first reaction isn’t pain, but checking whether the car is damaged, whether they can keep working, because in this era, “emotions” were squeezed out of the budget long ago. Adults don’t have the right to stop; they can only grit their teeth and move forward while patching the system’s loopholes. Those who can hold on, continue; those who can’t, quietly drop out.

So, this isn’t just a man falling in the snow—it’s an unspoken signal from an era: the ceiling is pressing down, the stairs are being pulled up, and for those with no way out, the scariest thing isn’t the wind and snow, but stopping.