How much money can an ordinary young person who enters society in 2020 earn without eating or drinking for a lifetime?
10 million? 20 million? Stop fantasizing.
The numerical changes caused by currency depreciation are not considered here, because prices are rising at the same time as currency depreciation, and the difficulty is the same or even greater. Also note that the discussion here is about ordinary people in mainland China. Among those who have just graduated and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in packages, the dragon and phoenix algorithm engineers are not included.
Assuming that an ordinary person starts working at the age of 22 and works until he retires at the age of 60, working for 38 years, according to Shanghai, where the average salary is relatively high in mainland China, the average monthly salary in 2023 is 12,696 yuan, so round it up and calculate it as 13,000.
Pessimistic expectations:
13,000 a month, 156,000 a year, 38 years of work, a total of 5.928 million.
It seems that you can only earn less than 6 million without eating or drinking for a lifetime.
Some people will definitely say that this calculation is wrong. How can wages not increase?
Japan's wages have not increased for 35 years, from 4.521 million yen in 1989 to 4.14 million yen in 2023.
But there is no problem. We believe that the fate of our generation is special. The urbanization process, land finance, and population structure will not hinder the development this time. Up only, this time is different.
Optimistic expectations:
Calculated by an annual wage increase of 3%, the annual salary in the first year is 156,000, the second year is 160,680, and so on. By the age of 60, the cumulative amount is about 10.78 million.
But this calculation is also problematic. Even if the economy does not decline for decades, who can guarantee that the individual's career will be smooth sailing again? Moreover, the wage increase will reach a ceiling when it reaches a certain value, and it is impossible to increase it again.
So, this calculation is not realistic.
In fact, in China, it becomes very difficult to find a job after the age of 35. If you are unemployed after the age of 45, you can basically only work as a security guard.
So, taking the middle value between 6 million and 10 million, an ordinary Chinese person can only earn about 8 million in his lifetime by working without eating or drinking in a big city like Shanghai.
The Cullinan that the well-known network administrator Riwa casually posted is the money that an ordinary person can earn without eating or drinking in his lifetime.
Before I calculated it carefully, I always felt that I had unlimited possibilities, and I always felt that 1 million was just a small number, as if I could earn it by just stretching out my hand, or I could easily lose it in the currency circle, but when the reality was in front of me, I realized:
The heart is higher than the sky, but the life is thinner than paper.