During the marketing management class two days ago, the professor told an interesting truth about market positioning. In layman’s terms, information fragments are stored in countless memory nodes in the brain, and each memory node produces a specific association, which allows us to associate certain keywords and have an “impression”. The so-called market positioning for brand marketing is to try to understand the network of memory nodes in the minds of customers, so as to accurately guide customers to have specific associations with their own brands.
This reminds me of most people’s association of “30 years old”.
In the traditional concept of many people, “30 years old” is always put on some terrible labels, especially for women. “Thirty years old” is like a curse. It seems that after this time, physical aging will accelerate instantly, the urgency of getting married and having children increases dramatically, and there must be a life-and-death duel between career and family. Are these stereotypes necessarily the truth?
I just passed my thirtieth birthday not long ago. Humans always like to set many milestones in time, such as “Thirty-year-old”. It is clear that the last day of twenty-nine years old and the first day of thirty years old will not be any fundamentally different. The interesting thing about human beings is that, no matter how reasonable they are, they will still fall into clichés, hoping to strengthen the memory of special time nodes through some “sense of ritual”.
I spent my last night at the age of twenty-nine with my husband and friends. I originally planned to sing to zero o’clock and greet the first second of my 30s. As a result, everyone forgot to accurately calculate the time. The song order system was brutally shut down at 23:54. The friends were unwilling, so they forcibly picked up the microphones to the mobile phones and used the music software to play a happy birthday song. A group of people laughed and sang loudly.
Frankly speaking, if a person who is big or small does this behavior alone, it will inevitably look weird and naive. But being a group of people is different. With the company of the group, it seems to have courage to do anything. Even if you are naive, you can share and amplify the joy of naivety. Therefore, these people who seemed somewhat crazy at this moment surrounded me and knocked on the door of thirty years old with me.
What did I feel at that moment? Surrounded by love.
I really feel that I am loved. I can even paint the shape of love and touch the texture of love. Love is willing to come to see me through all difficulties, is to laugh naively together unscrupulously, is to unsuspectingly reveal to each other the troubles, irritability and vulnerability that they usually hide.
I have had a revolutionary friendship for 23 years with my longest friend. In my short thirty-year life, to round up, these friends of mine have successively participated in my entire life since I can remember. Some people think that we are all going well, only we know each other, how we stumbled to the thirty-year-old mark.
But ah, thirty is not a terrible number, nor should it be tied up by those terrible labels. The scary thing is never age itself, but the possibility of “wasting” and “deteriorating”.
At the age of 30, I returned to school while I was busy with work, and once again took the initiative to choose a “difficult mode” life. Tomorrow will get better or worse, I can’t judge at all. At least I am gradually convinced that there is no irreconcilable contradiction between “no limit”, “no acceptance” and “let it go.”
My friends and I persisted all the way, but remained skeptical of certain established labels and turned fear of age into curiosity. We advocate courage, freedom, and love. We use ourselves as experiments, trying to rebuild the connection between age and life, and between the individual and the world. Only thirty, we can still go farther and see brighter light.
