如果你和你的伴侣颜值分别是98和2，你愿意自己2还是伴侣2？You're a 98, Your Partner's a 2 — Or Would You Rather Swap?

"The latest debate topic on U Can U BiBi is this: if you and your partner are rated 98 and 2 on looks, would you rather be the 2, or have your partner be the 2? I thought the question was fascinating, so I decided to write out how I see it, along with a few stray thoughts."

Let me start with how I read a few of the points made on the show. Sun Yingyu's opening line — her whole framing — didn't pick a good angle. She's not wrong that women are wired to be more suspicious and sensitive; women really do get emotional and feel insecure more easily than men. But the angle she chose left her wide open to a counterattack. Here's what she said:

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There's a glaring bug in this question, or rather a plain fact it ignores: everyone cares about face. Who says only men are vain? When it comes to wanting to look good, women don't fall a step behind men — if anything, they outdo them. Women are constantly clocking whether some other woman bought a new outfit or new makeup.

So the "someone I can show off in public" angle doesn't hold up for either side — no matter who's the 2, the other person still loses face and still carries the psychological weight. It's the wrong angle.

Later, the affirmative side's Da Wang and Mr. Shi Hang made basically the point I wanted to make — or at least, my rough take when I first saw the topic was close to theirs.

Their view, boiled down, ran something like this: some of us are the quietly self-sacrificing type — in a relationship we put our partner ahead of ourselves. When forced to choose, we'd rather shoulder the pressure, the burden, the unhappiness, all of it. Because of love. Sure, I'm not much to look at, but when I'm walking arm in arm with a Daniel Wu, I'm the one basking in glory. A flower stuck in a cowpat, maybe — but the cowpat this flower is stuck in is no ordinary cowpat. Me being a 2? That really can be beside the point.

Choosing to make yourself the 98 is like an earlier debate topic: shamelessness is a bad thing, a temptation. And everyone knows that with temptation, once there's a first time there's a second. We choose not to betray, not to let each other down; our choice is simply to keep a clear conscience. That's how I'd choose, and how I'd argue it.

But this too gets a lot of pushback — people say you're painting yourselves as too noble, and so on. I think that really comes down to personal temperament. Attaching two pictures of myself.

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Understood or misunderstood, I take it in stride. In life, being misunderstood is the norm; being understood is the exception. So whatever understanding you do get, from any quarter, cherish it.

Next, I'm pretty on board with Si Da's point too. His argument runs on economics — utility and the law of diminishing marginal returns: someone else's beauty, you look at every day, month after month, and eventually you get used to it; your own beauty is worth more than gold and can't be traded away. Get a little more beautiful yourself and you'll be over the moon. The reverse holds too: someone else's ugliness, you'll get used to; your own ugliness, you won't. And then, later:

Chen Ming: the button is in our hands right now, so we choose to make ourselves the 98, to make ourselves better. The essence of love is attraction, and becoming better is the only way to attract. If we let the other person choose, we'd want them to pick 98 too — that's the better version of her.

Finally, a word on Chen Yongkai. He said don't build your own happiness on top of someone else's happiness — but he never actually said whether he'd choose 98 or 2. So when Ma Weiwei got up to speak, she nailed him on it right away. And she's right: the foundation of two people being together is a shared worldview. Only when your values line up can you be together — when one person does something, the other can understand and support it.

Mr. Kang Yong, as always, answered gently and warmly, full of tenderness. But in the end it was Mr. Gao Xiaosong whose answer struck out on a fresh path — flipping the angle, taking the long view from on high, phrasing it all with real literary flair. No wonder he's everyone's idol.

He offered himself as living proof: looks have never been life's verdict. Otherwise, with a face like his, he'd have run out of room to survive long ago. And look — he has legions of devoted fans today, which makes the point rather powerfully.

As Mr. Gao said, looks aren't all of life. Real happiness and joy come from being a person of some depth yourself — from your own sense of security, and that security doesn't rest on your face and your appearance alone. Looks aren't the sole deciding factor, and recognizing that is itself an upgrade in how you see yourself and in your taste. Real happiness comes from being a person who isn't shallow.

Bettering yourself, improving yourself, happens on many fronts and at many levels. Put it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy: once you can disregard looks — that most basic-level need — and pursue higher-order aspirations and preferences, you become a vaster person. Fixate only on looks, and neglect everything else, and you're a vulgar person. There will always be plenty of unhappy people, and so there will always be dream merchants peddling escapes specifically to the unhappy.

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Lately everyone's been chewing on that line again: life isn't only the drudgery in front of you; there's also poetry and the distant horizon. Talk only about the poetry and the horizon, though, and the drudgery will very likely stay drudgery forever. Anyone who says "life isn't only drudgery" is surely disappointed with where they are, and needs to believe that in some place they haven't reached yet — but will reach one day — there's something good, so that today's grind becomes bearable. When you can disregard these differences, stay unruffled, and savor solitude, then it's truly the case that life isn't only the drudgery in front of you; there's also poetry and the distant horizon.

Which leads me, in a bit of a leap, to the subject of travel. I'm a travel lover — anyone who knows me knows that. Lately, and while watching the show, I've been thinking about this: what exactly sets the scenery of far-off places apart from the city I'm in now?

For a good chunk of people these days, travel has become a matter of going through the motions. The routine in every new place is more or less the same: museum, signature landmark, local snacks — then photos, and then you start forgetting.

After a fair amount of travel, I've gradually grown tired of and put off by this approach. What draws me to travel most now is the unexpected encounters along the way — the conversations with locals, with the people who actually belong to a place. Experiencing all sorts of styles, running into all sorts of chance meetings — that's where the joy is, and it's one of the reasons travel matters.

Couch-surf, for instance, and you get to know the locals; with a little luck you become good friends, and they might even take you around, show you the city, tell you the story of the place or of their own life.

Years later I might forget what I actually saw in a given city, and the photos may have long yellowed — but that experience will still stay vivid, and I'll linger over it, and think it was a wonderful, rewarding trip.

Take Europe. Europe is the dream of everyone who loves to travel, and I'm no exception. Germany's rigor and stiffness, France's warmth and romance, Spain's passion and heat, Britain's chill and erudition, Italy's unreliability and its beaches, Turkey where Eastern and Western religion and culture blend in harmony, Switzerland's cleanliness and calm, Iceland like a running slideshow, the Netherlands blanketed in flowers — this cultural diversity, this depth of heritage, pulls at me every waking moment. The cultural lines are sharp and blurred at once.

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Europe is the cradle of modern civilization, with a deep-rooted elegance and heritage and a harmony that radiates from within. Going to Europe truly isn't about standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, or the British Museum, snapping a photo, posting it, and calling it "been there" — that really means nothing. Europe isn't large, yet it holds a rich diversity of cultures. That kind of cultural experience, that depth of heritage, is hard to feel anywhere outside Europe.

Read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand miles. The point of the miles isn't to mark off where you've been, or to post photos and show off.

The way I see it, if your so-called "travel" is just an exercise in collecting visa stamps from various countries — if your life has grown so impoverished that you have to boast about how many countries you've hit to scrape together some tiny sense of validation — if you actually think their "Top Ten Places to Visit" lists count for anything, then you're just a tourist trying to find a sense of your own existence.

In that case your travels will never make you a more interesting person. You're just one more body in the crowd trailing behind the tour guide.

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Enough of the travel tangent — back to the show. The greatest meaning, or value, of U Can U BiBi is something Ma Dong and Gao Xiaosong have said more than once on air: "By this point, this show, I think, has made a real contribution — not just for us, but for this era — and that contribution is defending the value of pluralism."

Ma Dong stressed the same thing repeatedly in interviews: he doesn't see U Can U BiBi as a debate show, but as an entertainment show with a point of view. In today's society, nothing is more frightening than a single, monolithic set of values. There's no such thing as truth that gets clearer the more you argue it; whatever exists has its reason for existing. The greatest value of U Can U BiBi is that it broadens our worldview.

I quite agree. We absolutely need to hear both sides. It doesn't just loosen us up — the ones listening to them argue the contentious, sensitive topics — it also loosens society's tolerance and attitude toward certain issues and phenomena; and it loosens up the debaters themselves. We must never let ourselves be boxed in by any one, or any few, of the views aired on the show.

Find the balance between candor and honesty. Don't blindly pick a team over your own way of living, and don't take the joke labels for the real thing. Pure, flawless, single-minded fixation is fragile glass; embracing the murky, accepting the complex, and presenting yourself with warmth — that's the true, unpolished jade.

Whether a show can last and even leave a mark on people comes down, in the end, to what it stands for. U Can U BiBi, like Kangxi Coming, resonates with us precisely because it embraces pluralistic values — never talking down to us, never just mugging for laughs — striking a chord amid all the jokes and jabs, and offering us a sliver of warmth in the noise and the restlessness.