Intellectual Recycling Station

Old Wang woke up from a coma, his mind feeling like freshly mixed cement, a complete mush. He remembered he was a firefighter, had rushed into a fire to save a child, and then, he couldn't remember anything else. The doctor said he suffered a concussion, his intellect had regressed to elementary school level. Fortunately, through rehabilitation, he had now recovered to high school level.

Old Wang breathed a sigh of relief. High school was not bad. At least he could read the newspaper and do some calculations. Although he couldn't solve advanced math problems, it was enough for daily life. He returned to the fire station. His teammates patted him on the shoulder, calling him a hero and saying he was lucky to survive that kind of fire.

But Old Wang felt something was off. He discovered that during their breaks, his teammates weren’t discussing firefighting skills, but the latest short videos, who had become popular on which platform. They no longer showed much excitement about saving lives, but were particularly concerned about their superiors' promotions. He tried to bring up his feelings from the fire scene, but they laughed at him, “Old Wang, you are really living in the past. Who cares about those things now? Whoever is popular is the one that matters.”

Old Wang was a bit lost. To better integrate into the group, he also started watching short videos, following online celebrities, trying to understand what his teammates considered “important”. He found that these “important” people didn’t seem to need to make any actual contributions. They only needed to know how to package themselves, create gimmicks, and they could gain traffic and attention.

He once believed that saving people was a firefighter's duty, a matter of pride. But now, it seemed like just an ordinary, even somewhat outdated, act. The fire trucks in the station looked shiny and new, but were rarely deployed. More energy was focused on “safety promotion”, and the content of the safety promotion was nothing more than old clichés, combined with special effects and music, looping endlessly in short videos.

Old Wang tried to ask Old Li, “Do we not go out on calls anymore?” Old Li patted him on the shoulder and said earnestly, “Old Wang, you just recovered, there are some things you don't understand. Now it’s a ‘safe society,’ the probability of fires is getting lower and lower. Our main job is ‘prevention’. Instead of rushing into fires, it is better to post more short videos to raise everyone's safety awareness. That’s truly serving the people.”

Old Wang nodded silently. He felt like a part discarded by society, trying hard to get back into the machine, only to find that the machine was no longer the one he remembered.

One day, the station organized a "safety knowledge competition." Old Wang answered many questions correctly and won first place. The leader praised him on stage, saying he was not only brave but also smart. His colleagues also applauded, but their applause was mixed with some perfunctoriness. Old Wang looked at his prize – a selfie stick printed with the fire station logo – and suddenly felt it was somewhat absurd. He remembered during the days of his intellectual regression, he seemed to still feel a kind of simple passion.

He looked at the glamorous faces in the short videos, and listened to his teammates discussing whose fan count had gone up, he suddenly realized that he seemed to have regressed again, this time into a deeper abyss of “ignorance.” He found that the logic and rules of this world had changed, becoming incomprehensible to him.

He walked to the fire station's backyard, looked at the rusty fire axe, and sighed. Perhaps what he really needed to recover was not his intellect, but that heart that once believed in justice and dared to rush into the fire. The next day, Old Wang submitted his resignation. He decided to go to a place where no one was watching short videos and regain his intelligence. On his way, he saw people filming a fire scene. To attract attention, no one was trying to put out the fire, everyone was just busy recording videos. Old Wang laughed, a mocking laugh. He knew that his intellect would never return to normal, because this was an abnormal world. He turned and disappeared around the street corner.