This article was written by Fat Cat

The truth is that many of us are already living the tomorrow we dreamed of years ago. We just don't even realize it.

When I was a kid, we thought it must be cool to eat KFC every day, and now you don't even want to eat it if it's given to you every day.

When we didn't have computers and had to avoid teachers and parents when we went to an Internet café, we all thought that if we had our own computers, and if we had computers, and if we could eat KFC every day, we would have nothing more to ask for in life. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a computer in my life, but I'm sure I've never seen one in my life.

While we've long since reached our dream tomorrow, we don't seem to be as happy as we thought we would be. And that includes many people's incomes. With age, these years around the social status of their peers also have, the hand more or less have some of their own small side business, income of millions of are quite a lot, far more than they expected back then.

But ask a circle down, as if there is no one really living a very cool feeling. It's still generally exhausting, and even those who make millions a year don't feel like they're living a very high quality of life.

This is strange. Obviously our incomes are rising year after year, so why aren't the days more comfortable? Isn't it said that good money buys everything, including happiness?

How on earth can we make life peaceful and pleasurable? Traditional Chicken Soup for the Soul tends to tell us:

"Get up in good spirits and go out for a morning jog every day," and "Prepare yourself a hearty and nutritious breakfast" will make the day good.

These things seem to make sense, but they don't mean shit. Because that uncomfortable feeling we get comes from one problem after another that we actually have to face and deal with.

It's pointless to just lie to yourself and say you're living a good life without fixing those problems.

The reason why affluence doesn't necessarily lead to a better quality of life is that:

Many of us, despite the fact that our incomes have gone up considerably, our expenditures on "purchasing comfort" or "purchasing fulfillment" have not increased in tandem with our incomes. year-over-year.

The spending habits that everyone develops early in life are very y ingrained. If you weren't born rich, but became rich on your own, your habits and spending habits can't change overnight, but will always be marked by years of deprivation.

Chinese people's long-standing economic habits have been to accumulate food and slow down consumption, and I have observed that many rich people, especially the rich generation, do not live as extravagantly as the outside world imagines; on the contrary, many of them are quite frugal, and the kind of frugality that is unnecessary.

The Dream of the Red Chamber says that three generations have learned to eat and wear, and it is important to realize that consumption is also a university question that needs to be learned and practiced over the years.

Many people have money after just learning to spend money to buy "expanded reproduction", at most also learned to "spend money to buy face", and do not know how to spend money in order to make their own subjective life become more comfortable, so the standard of living compared to the average person is not a qualitative leap. The fact is that there is no qualitative leap in the standard of living compared to that of the average person, who, to put it politely, is still living a low-quality and low-level life.

What are the dimensions in which money can be spent most effectively, most quickly and most directly to improve the quality of life? Without putting chicken soup, here are a few core ideas for the middle class:

1

Spend money to reduce all low-value chores

The so-called chores are things that take up a lot of time and energy but have very low value.

You should know that the middle class is the most scarce and expensive is time, the essence of high-income careers is their own bosses and customers are willing to spend a lot of money to buy their own time, but who knows many inexplicable people and things in life, but to take our time is so not to be taken seriously, this is the cause of our unhappiness is the most direct reason.

The first thing you need to do to improve your quality of life is to get rid of the trivialities.

For example, if you want to leave the housework to your aunt, you can take full advantage of China's cheap labor; if you want to travel, don't carry your own luggage, throw it to the courier, and take full advantage of China's powerful logistics. And if you can get your subordinates and assistants to take care of the chores at work, throw them all out as much as possible; and if you're a little more extreme, like George Clooney in Up in the air, ask a remote assistant to pick up all the phone calls and filter them first.

Additionally, don't get involved in anything that saves you a little bit of money, or that costs you a little bit of money, but consumes your time.

For example, a lot of apps daily punch card, merchant reviews rebate, do activities to get discounts and other messy things. These things may seem like a handful, but they add up to a lot and can fill your life with all sorts of nonsense, and your mind can't be refreshed.

People's energy is limited, put in front of too many choices, will forget their actual needs. Once you cut off all the trivialities, and make a break for your own psyche, your brain will naturally have more space to be freed up to face more important things.

2

Buying things that shorten the decision-making chain

Simply put, it takes "a few steps" to do something, and the fewer the steps the better, the more the worse. When income grows, replacing things with "more steps" with things with "fewer steps" is the direction of consumer upgrading and a shortcut to better quality of life.

In the past, in the era of poverty, people did not have many choices, so they had an obsessive fascination with increasing options, and what was most popular at that time was all kinds of multi-functional things, preferably microwave ovens that could play songs, and fridges that could watch TV, which resulted in a large number of wacky and complicated products. And it's a design mindset that's been passed down.

The traditional TV industry is the hardest hit, not to mention the elderly, and now even I don't know how to turn on the TV - first you have to turn on the TV power, then you have to turn on the power of the set-top box, and then switch back and forth between the two remotes, with a bunch of buttons on the remotes that I don't know what they're for.

So I chose HDMI to connect to my computer to watch movies, and it was instantly clean.

Thinking about the fact that our generation is gradually moving away from TV is probably due to the fact that we can't continue to tolerate these stupid designs because of our pursuit of quality of life.

Well, smart homes are on the rise now, and I recently remodeled my home all over again, turning lights on and off, humidifying and cooling the air, all solved by the human body sensors and indoor and outdoor sensors, and my happiness has exploded. Automation is the ultimate weapon to reduce the brain's thinking choices (and shorten the chain of thought).

Too many choices are no longer good in today's information age, the explosion of information, technology should help the brain to reduce the processing of things, rather than increase the amount of processing.

Buying everything in terms of whether it's worth it or not by shortening the thinking steps, not whether it's a good or bad brand, expensive or cheap, is a sure-fire way to improve your quality of life.

3

Minimize Meaningless and Unnecessary Socializing

This is mainly because we often don't realize that socializing is a black hole of time and energy that may not be as meaningful as we think.

It may be understandable that college students are keen to socialize - after all, there's the need for job hunting and courting - but once you've been working for a number of years, you realize that socializing is your biggest source of fatigue and stress, and the need for it is very much in need of a re-examination.

Social networks are the most influential in our lives and the most likely to create black holes in our time. We often find that we can't get enough of our friends' circles, which are filled with more irrelevant information than we care about, and the developments we really care about are drowned out instead.

Maybe try to read the circle of friends once a day before you go to bed at night; regularly empty the email and chat records; keep 1-2 social software at most, and delete the apps that you haven't used for a month; and then, for example, clean up the microblogging, Zhihu, and the public number, leaving only a small part of the information flow of the more high-quality ones.

More importantly, stop any interaction that makes you unhappy in a timely manner, whether it's the three aunts and six mothers in your family or that nagging coworker you're dealing with, and stop responding when you feel uncomfortable.

And the same goes for parties of all kinds, we've all had years where we spent a lot of energy and time on these things.

The only reason why we put such a burden on ourselves is because we are thin-skinned and embarrassed to say no. In fact, if you refuse a few more times, the people around you will get used to it.

The cost of a party is not only money, but the time and energy spent on attending a party, all these intangible things, are really not necessarily worth less than the money you spend on the meal.

I know someone who has been practicing this for several years, and unless they are family members and relatives, they refuse to go to parties with more than one person, and it's not bad at all. Others insist on turning off their cell phones at 10:00 a.m. every day, and say they feel that suddenly the whole world has become quiet.

Human energy is limited, and we can't maintain every relationship well, especially now that liking a post means only "read", so it doesn't make much sense to maintain a relationship like that.

Try to block some of the less relevant people, in this process of trade-offs, you will know which people are important to you, so that you can concentrate more on the better, more valuable people and things.

4

Buy things that reduce feelings of loss of control

A sense of control over the things around us is the foundation of our emotional peace. But because today's endless array of situations can keep coming in, cutting in, and interrupting what we're supposed to be doing in all sorts of ways, taking care of the head doesn't make it possible to take care of the tail, which leads to an out-of-control powerlessness over our lives.

Many people's work itself is an out-of-control thing, we intended to work hard because we want to give our families a better life, want to earn more money, always thinking that a promotion and a raise would be good, and the result is that with each promotion, the workload is getting bigger and bigger. Instead, we don't have time to spend with our families, and work, bosses, and customers start to take up all the time.

No-face emotions often come from a sense of loss of control. The moments when the brain realizes that it is powerless to control, our lives are naturally not very comfortable or quality.

It's easiest to get irritated while driving, because there's a need to stay hyper-aware of the road, but at the same time there are many in-car situations to deal with.

For example, if you're a grown man and you're driving your child to an early childhood program every day, you can't do anything about a crying, screaming baby. The child in the car, toys, snacks, all do not work, and have to drive and coax the child, usually the eight face of the wind at this time also lost, this is life out of control moments.

Then again, modern communication tools have made life and work completely borderless.

We often have not yet arrived at the company, text messages, phone calls, e-mail reminders have come one after another, hundreds of WeChat group can have thousands of messages a day? Just responding to messages every day has taken him a lot of time. This 24-hour on-call state, but also life out of control at the moment.

The straight man took a ride with a few ladies. A group of women in the back row chattering, from the hottest beauty fashion chat to the star gossip, those professional terms and the name of the fresh meat, all unintelligible. Want to be quiet and alone for a while, but always feel the awkwardness from the rearview mirror, more out of control moments.

This time, if you buy a new generation of Cadillac XTS, the sense of loss of control can be significantly reduced:

The face of the noisy bear children only need three steps:

The new generation of Cadillac XTS special launch of multi-account personalized customization, the next time the bear children naughty and mischievous, try listening to him to listen to his favorite cartoon music, instant clean.

In the face of the ensuing rush of work, it's also three steps:

The unique Hybird voice recognition system is like a a a resourceful and efficient personal assistant, more accurate and excellent voice control, so that 24-hour standby life under control.

Faced with the embarrassing situation of the backseat chatter, it is a three-step process:

XTS's high-definition streaming media mirror, the rear of the car's ultra-wide-angle image projected on the 9.2-inch rear-view mirror, so that the body, the seat and the passengers of the rear field of view of the car to the history of the obstruction.

Helping to keep driving under control is the XTS' Apple CarPlay system. Answering phone calls, replying to text messages, and playing music from your cell phone through Siri voice control can greatly ease the moments of hand-holding and enhance the quality of life.

The reason why I'm pushing Cadillac here is because it just so happens that this topic reminds me of a question on KnowledgeBase that asked why some men don't get out of their cars when they drive home, but want to laze around in the car alone.

To have this question shows that many people can't understand what a car means to men today.

The car is already the last refuge and fortress of today's middle class male. A reply with over 4,000 likes says it all: "Don't want to get out of the car because it's a demarcation point. Push open the door of the car you are the faggot, the father, the son, the husband, only not yourself; in the car, a person in the car want to be quiet, smoke a cigarette, this body belongs to yourself."

This explains why many people not only like to drive the car to the doorstep to park for a while, sometimes even around the doorstep to turn around and take a long way around, there are countless nights when you can't think straight, you can be alone with the stereo driving in circles on the highway.

In fact, today's middle-class men are not short of money; what they lack most now is a sense of control over their lives and a shelter for their souls. Whoever can deliver this feeling will fulfill the needs of the middle class.

Click the original article to go to Cadillac's official website to learn more about the new generation of Cadillac XTS, and let this car open the door to a new world.