我们身体里都有个许知远，也有个李诞There's a Xu Zhiyuan and a Li Dan in All of Us

Live out Li Dan's gray; hold on to Xu Zhiyuan's white.

I've followed Thirteen Invitations for a long time. The Li Dan episode sets up a fascinating contrast: Xu Zhiyuan, forever furrowing his brow on the show, is actually a hedonist, with the open, sunny, boyish outlook to match. And Li Dan, giggling and grinning on TV all day long, turns out to be the pessimist—someone who wishes he were more mature than his years.

Xu Zhiyuan, the blunt, adorably foolish kid

Xu Zhiyuan is the classic Faustian intellectual—forever chasing meaning. Mass culture is too vulgar, too loud, meaningless; the mocking, riffing register of stand-up dissolves the very questions themselves, and is even more meaningless. Like a long post-adolescent poem, he goes on and on, muttering about his own melancholy and anxiety. Xu often frets that he'll leave nothing behind for posterity—yet in front of Li Dan he's actually brimming with confidence, and a touch of disdain: "Your stuff will vanish as the noise of the crowd moves on, while mine can pierce through the years."

He's also a bygone-era man of letters, a pedantic soul—an out-of-place skeptic who doesn't live in the present. He's serious; he yearns for and pursues the real. He dislikes "getting younger." That "youthification" is a catch-all: it refers both to young people and to today's pop culture.

Xu Zhiyuan has always seen himself as an intellectual, believing intellectuals carry a certain social responsibility—that they need to guide the values of the ordinary, so-called foolish masses, and shape the public's artistic literacy and taste. So he needs to push back, to grieve, to rage, to express himself with fervent emotion, hoping to find meaning.

For exactly that reason, he wishes society would keep progressing, that culture and art could produce great works, and so on. He believes eras can be ranked by quality: the great eras have artists who transcend their time and produce brilliant, monumental works, becoming each era's shining moment, handed down and remembered by later generations. Mass pop culture, meanwhile, once its moment passes, vanishes into thin air, replaced and forgotten.

You can see he's deeply influenced by Western individualism, feeling that a person ought to be themselves, that we're each independent individuals who express our truest feelings and don't cling to the crowd. No wonder, then: he doesn't know how to please the masses, doesn't know how to package himself, and never managed to become the version of himself everyone would like to see. He strives to make his voice heard, but he doesn't grasp that the masses don't much care for those profound truths, and are put off by his obscure, bookish prose. In an age of amusing ourselves to death, people prefer the simple and easily understood, prefer fun, funny variety shows, prefer bullet-comments and gaming, prefer joy and pleasure. Dodging stress, keeping pain at a distance. For exactly that reason, people are willing to live up to the expectations of conventional values, and even feel this is what they truly want—because it's easier than the alternative.

What Xu Zhiyuan needs is to still be standing once everything else has vanished into thin air—to be able to carry on exactly as he is even amid a chorus of online abuse, because he doesn't care about you.

At the same time, he's a deeply contradictory man. Facing Lo Ta-yu, Pai Hsien-yung, Feng Xiaogang, Chen Jiaying—people older than him, or with far greater social standing and influence—Xu comes across as thoroughly deferential; in front of them, he sheds the "prejudice" his show's own slogan boasts of, and the questions he asks tend to fall back on the public's clichéd impressions of those figures. Facing people his own age, though—Ma Dong, say, or Yu Feihong—Xu is too eager to be affirmed, to be validated; instead of asking how you think, it turns into: "Surely you think the same way I do?" So his questions get warped, and these were the two episodes that drew Xu the most disses and mockery.

What Xu Zhiyuan is probably thinking, deep down, is this: In an age of forward motion, there's laughter and chatter; in an age of stagnation, silent thought is all the more precious. Immersed in his own linguistic system, searching in vain, Xu is like a misunderstood child—unable to argue back, he can only lower his head and stand in the corner, and keep pondering the boundaries of what dialogue even means.

Xu Zhiyuan wants other people's answers, but he seems never to have considered whether they're willing to hand those answers over to him. So he demands. He rebukes the world in the hope of changing it. For an intellectual to have a direct, immediate impact on the world is not a large ambition, and it can't be. Events and ideas that produce a real-time, direct effect on people are, of necessity, things that come fast and go fast. So Xu Zhiyuan is demanding the impossible.

You can't demand that things which can't work fast produce fast results; you can't demand of fast results the depth that only comes from slow growth. To the point that he impatiently steps forward to challenge: "Making all this stuff that won't last—don't you feel guilty?" That is Xu Zhiyuan's impossible demand.

Li Dan, the wise, worldly-mature old man

Li Dan is precisely the opposite. He loves Buddhist thought and is steeped in its value system—clever, clear-eyed, seeing right through things. Nothing fazes him; he has his own confidence, and it comes from this: "I'm ready to vanish into thin air at any moment," "All eras are the same at heart—they all end in death." This intense sense of nothingness stands opposed to Xu Zhiyuan's ardor and attachment—their exact reverse. A true "Buddhist youth": maybe he really has straightened himself out, smoothed himself down—both given up and figured it out.

Li Dan doesn't actually market himself as a "Buddhist youth"; that's a label the show pinned on him. It brings to mind something Liu Yu once said: beyond the black-and-white lies a vast gray zone of thought, and that zone tends to be the truest test of intellectual precision. Canceling someone's meaning by pushing their view to its extreme is exactly the kind of dodging that plagues public debate.

Li Dan is the sort who sees things with great clarity (a word I've felt a lot lately)—not that he's actually grasped some ultimate truth, but that his gaze and his thinking can pierce the surface of things and reach somewhere deeper.

Li Dan's idealism died during an internship, and later he took money to lecture Chizi in front of him—the arc of it all comes down to a single line: you can't be without ideals, but you also can't be an idealist; you can't be an idealist, but you also can't be without ideals.

Many of us can see, to some degree, our own past shadow and present shape in Li Dan. A single "back in the day," a few bands you loved when you were young, a few authors always nominated but never awarded, and you can sketch out a perfect theater of the absurd. People love this kind of absurdity—it inexplicably lends a person a heroic stature, casting everyone as a martyr of their age. As for Xu Zhiyuan, calling him someone who holds fast to himself, or someone who failed to fit into society, both seem a little off the mark—but one thing is clear: he's not one of us, the majority.

Li Dan stresses that a lot of things "are lived out, not thought out." He believes melancholy and desolation aren't badass; what's truly badass is the thing you actually make. Just like people who think listening to niche music or watching niche films makes them highbrow—so what? To be badass is, fundamentally, for the music and the films to be badass, not for you to have "suffered through" them. If, after watching a film, you can write a review that actually helps other people, that proves you're the real deal.

Li Dan sees himself as a former artsy youth. He says he once despised that type of artsy youth—because rebellion, rage, and melancholy are utterly meaningless. He likens society to a program and himself to code, and code needs to keep running; when something breaks, it needs to be patched right away. The so-called artsy youth, taken to its end point, always becomes an intellectual. It's just that Li Dan no longer wants to fight the world; he's found his release, found his self-realization: do comedy well, and bring joy to more people. This is a form of release—and it also brings him money.

Li Dan looks hopeless, but he actually isn't. Telling the truth while giggling and grinning—that's his way of resisting; that signature laugh is where his hope shows itself. He knows full well that too lofty a posture invites abuse, and too much truth-telling means you can't make money. Play by the rules, and play better than the people inside them—this is how he chooses to follow the rules without being disciplined by them.

Li Dan's "hopelessness" is really a kind of powerlessness—the powerlessness that comes after struggling, the giving-up that comes after resignation, the "sang" (dispiritedness) that comes after giving up. But this sang culture isn't negative; it's just a different way of making peace with yourself.

Maybe it bears out that line from Liu Yu: Sometimes, what a person needs is genuine despair. True despair has nothing to do with pain or grief. It brings you a calm, level heart; it makes you realize you can't rely on anyone, anyone at all, for your happiness. It humbles you, because everything others can give you becomes a pleasant surprise. It leaves you with nowhere to turn but your own inner life.

We keep changing ourselves, keep fitting into society, keep growing, molting from youth into a greasy middle age. In the end, we become society itself.

Xu Zhiyuan's demanding, seen from the other side, reflects Li Dan's dislocation. Li said to Xu: "You fall into your own linguistic system too easily. You're too far from the masses." True—the two of them belong to two different linguistic systems. What Li Dan means is: if you want influence, you can't burrow into your own world; lowering your posture is the necessary price of gaining influence.

And an intellectual's linguistic system, for the sake of communicating, is bound to have jargon, which dooms it to never being fully open to the masses. The intellectual needn't care whether their writing is far from the masses, and the masses needn't read it, because thought can only ever influence the world by seeping in. So Xu Zhiyuan has no need to rebuke Li Dan for the resistance he's given up, and Li Dan has no need to coax Xu out; each belongs to a different mode of operation.

Li Dan is young, but he himself is more like a greasy middle-aged man, while Xu Zhiyuan, by contrast, is more like a boy—and Li Dan is even teaching Xu how to get slick, how to become so-called mature. This is one reason he kept telling everyone on Weibo to go watch the full version, even though Xu doesn't need any of it at all. You can see that Li Dan is, at his core, a rather soft person—not hard enough, afraid of collision—which is also why he's so suited to comedy, and does it so well.

There's a Xu Zhiyuan and a Li Dan in all of us

Two passages from Forever Young feel just right for these two generations.

For Xu Zhiyuan's generation, from Tagore: "With all my sincerity I implore you: do not take the wrong road, do not be bewildered, do not forget your calling, and never heed the seduction of vulgar forces, the clamor of monstrous absurdities, the accumulated fashions and the unconscious, aimless lure of profit."

And for Li Dan's generation, from the character Zhang Guoguo: "What you see and hear will often leave you dejected. The world is so powerful—so powerful that you won't even summon the thought to change it. But if you had the chance to know your life in advance, to know that youth is only these few days, I wonder whether you'd still care about the things the world hopes you'll care about—how much you possess before you can be glorious, what you own before you can be loved. When you grow up, you'll delight at a green shoot breaking through the soil, cheer and leap at the rising morning sun, and give others kindness and warmth. But while you're praising other lives, you'll often—perhaps forever—forget your own preciousness."

The two of them share skewers and drinks at a restaurant in Inner Mongolia: "This is just how the world's logic works. Everywhere is filthy, there's no utopia—so I'll just run anyway." The artsy youth's spirit of resistance is one of the few things they still hold in common in their conversation; it's only that for Li Dan, that resistance and the consciousness of it are past tense, present perfect, while for Xu Zhiyuan they're simple future, present continuous.

So throughout the conversation Xu Zhiyuan holds on to an expectation: that Li Dan, once a rebel himself, could feel some nostalgia for who he used to be, and some reverence for those who still keep their principles and hold fast. But Li Dan "lets him down." Li Dan is refreshingly direct, unsentimental: giving up means giving up. When people of different underlying colors give up the same thing, the work they do to get there isn't the same—so for Li Dan, giving up is seeing through, with no going back.

Many people have piled all sorts of concepts and labels onto this conversation: two value systems, two attitudes toward life, even a collision between the old society and the new.

There's really no need to complicate it that much. It's simply a happy person and a not-so-happy person sitting down to talk about what happiness means. What's interesting is that Li Dan—the one artsy youth everyone quotes with "cheer up, friends, the world isn't worth it"—turned out to make plenty of demands; while the stubborn, hard-headed Xu Zhiyuan walked away with the largest share of satisfaction.

The two of them keep circling one question—how to handle the relationship between the individual self and this era. But their definitions of "era" differ. Li Dan's definition of era is more like a momentum, closer to present-day life itself, a "small era"; while the era Xu speaks of sits on a grand temporal scale, standing within the whole long river of history.

Xu Zhiyuan places himself very high, and he surely has the capital and standing to do so. He's an "old-school youth"—only old men like to sort different people into generations—and he wants, like intellectuals of other ages, to claim a place in history. But he's also timid, and there lies his contradiction.

At 28, Li Dan earnestly counsels the 41-year-old Xu Zhiyuan like an old-timer: humans are social animals, we live for others, don't be a bother to people. Xu really does bother people—not entirely because of that self-absorbed, self-important intellectual streak, but also because it's not enough for him to chase meaning himself; he insists on constantly transmitting his anxiety over the ultimate meaning of life to everyone else, whether guest or viewer.

Xu Zhiyuan looks down on shows like U Can U BiBi—the "very low" business of repackaging and reselling the same old views. He pursues the highbrow, Shakespeare and the like. Li Dan explains to him that this is a consumption upgrade, and uses Xu's own Owspace bookstore as the example. In the present day, a bookstore can't survive on selling books; without artiness and highbrow cred, it's doomed to have few visitors. A variety show that peddles opinions sells to people who don't want to read yet want a quick hit of the knowledge experience. Owspace sells to the artsy youth who can read but also want to hoist themselves up and play at being intellectuals. When it comes to making the argument, Xu Zhiyuan is maybe a shade better than Ma Dong. It's just that Ma Dong is clever and doesn't say it, while Xu is too blunt, too foolish—and his curiosity is thoroughly endearing.

Li Dan's cleverness isn't cunning or getting-by; it's a true maturity: he understands the importance of price, so he never picks a fight over it, and at the same time he holds fast to value and keeps reconfirming where his sense of justice comes from. The two of them are, at bottom, the same kind of person: people who can come strikingly close to internal self-consistency within their own logic, and yet still make room for other value systems. That's why they can talk and laugh for four hours, from art and life to the self and the world. It's what earlier guests have noted too: sitting across from Xu Zhiyuan, you feel a real urge to talk.

Xu Zhiyuan is a young man; only the young have inexhaustible hope, believing they can do something for this world through their own effort. He genuinely wants to understand and make sense of this fast-changing mass society, and he does it brimming with sincerity—if a little real blunt. Li Dan, meanwhile, says he no longer chases profundity; "changing the world" and the like were the notions of a younger self, ones he's since given up—he says everything ends in the same result anyway. Xu asks him: doesn't that count as a kind of giving up on yourself? Li Dan says, I guess so, but in giving up I've also figured things out.

Li Dan's stance toward Xu Zhiyuan is more like protection and completion. He casts himself as Xu's opposite, seemingly mocking him without mercy, but every bit of it is pitched with exactly the right measure. In his own way he's helping the audience understand Xu Zhiyuan, and shaping a Xu Zhiyuan who, however flawed in his verbal expression, is in truth immensely sincere and endearing.

Li Dan is an untangled clear-eyed man: he knows the conventional world and caters to it, his clarity hidden inside the laughter and mockery, savoring the loneliness of reveling in a crowd. Xu Zhiyuan is a tangled clear-eyed man: he knows the conventional world and refuses to cater to it, his clarity laid bare in his words and language, savoring the solitude of standing apart from his age. Our society needs both kinds of people—one forever questioning and disdaining this society, one slowly making peace with the world.

From one angle, we seem close to Li Dan, but we're actually far from him. Xu Zhiyuan, by contrast, is nearer to us. And he's no ivory-tower recluse cut off from reality either; on the contrary, he keeps a young person's curiosity and openness, even hoping his own prejudices get shattered—which is itself remarkable, at least less narrow-minded than the people who pass sweeping judgment on others from a single screenshot. The show's rotating sponsors say something about this too.

The era we live in has long since left ignorance behind; we live in an "enlightening" age. And yet a growing intolerance for "difference" seems to be taking hold. Xu Zhiyuan has a legitimate reason to exist, and Li Dan has the right to speak. Xu Zhiyuan and Li Dan are both tools for going on living.

And one of the interesting things about a society is precisely that it holds a thousand kinds of difference. Insisting that everyone be Xu Zhiyuan, or that everyone come admire Li Dan, would be no different from a pyramid scheme brainwashing the masses.

Savoring desolation is no more highbrow or profound than savoring pleasure. To each their own—so profundity has its different ways of being profound, and letting go has its different ways of letting go. One grins and jokes, one worries for the nation and its people; one walks the broad sunlit road, one crosses the single-log bridge; each is at peace in their own way.

The shallow isn't necessarily meaningless—it may in fact be more profound. When a person searches for the self too much, they lose sight of the basic laws governing the world's development. That's why Xu envies Chizi's state of being: angry is just angry, happy is just happy, with nothing else dragged into it. At the very least, living shallowly is a little happier.

I like them both—clarity has its own virtue, tangledness its own charm. It brings to mind a passage from Gu Cheng: "The Chinese are a people who understand too much. Ever since Laozi said 'Heaven and Earth are not benevolent; they treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs,' they've been aware that the universe has no sentimental bond with them—that man is but an accidental phenomenon in the cosmos, infinitely small, and that whether he knows or doesn't know makes no difference. The conclusion was reached long ago; all that's left is to handle this small stretch of life in the human world."

There's a Xu Zhiyuan and a Li Dan in all of us. It's just that everything shifts with time and place as the variables. When alone, maybe you're 80% Xu Zhiyuan and 20% Li Dan; when socializing, 20% Xu Zhiyuan and 80% Li Dan. We respect the Xu Zhiyuan in the other person, and we clink glasses and revel with the Li Dan in them.

A last piece of advice to myself: Live out Li Dan's gray; hold on to Xu Zhiyuan's white.

If our generation of young people all end up like Li Dan—using tricks that amount to snark to play tai chi with the world, too afraid to face real social reality, too eager to shrug off social responsibility and lose ourselves in the revelry of individualism—then this country has no hope.

We are society, and we are not. We stay clear-eyed. And we also sing and dance and drink ourselves under.