Lesson 1: Make money in a... reckless way

Young people and the ideal balance - money in modern life

Modern life with the remarkable progress of technology and science makes the lives of young people more and more dependent on material things.

The door to cross-border integration has never been wider open, with a variety of ways to establish oneself and start a career, causing the way of thinking and perception of many young people to change rapidly. The attraction of money in the era of open economy , international integration, diverse culture with all its good and bad aspects is affecting the ideology, thinking, stimulating a materialistic lifestyle in a part of young people and regardless of the cost to get rich quickly, making many people doubt: Where is the balance of ideals and money - young people standing?

The worrying problem that exists among a segment of today's youth is the pragmatic lifestyle, always putting material things first and disregarding values, standards, and ethics to make money. The rise of instinctive desires, opportunities, chasing after pleasures, immediate benefits, moving away from the goal of striving, along with an indifferent, apathetic attitude, not fighting against what is wrong nor supporting what is right, healthy emotions are gradually replaced by money relationships, which is an alarming consequence of the pragmatic lifestyle that corrupts people.

Illustration photo: VNA

Where the money is, there is the head.

Officially launched in our country's market not long ago, but after a short time, Vietnam has ranked sixth in the top 10 countries using TikTok the most in the world. From an entertainment platform, TikTok has gradually become a tool that brings great benefits to content creators and is especially popular and attracts young people. There would be nothing to discuss if this platform had not been transformed by some TikTokers into a chaotic cyberspace full of dirty, anti-cultural, and non- educational clips with the sole purpose of attracting views and likes, and then everything is converted into money. A group of young people do not hesitate to spread the slogan "Where the money is, there is the mind", meaning that the mind is used at full capacity to make a lot of money without hesitating to circumvent the law, performing all kinds of challenges from "sex-shocking-corny" to trampling on values, standards, and ethics.

With the constant coverage and growing influence of TikTok in Vietnam, especially when the "TikTok shop" application was born, it immediately became a fertile land for diverse content creators and businesses. To attract customers to their sales pages, some young people use all kinds of tricks from dancing to show off their bodies, spreading vulgar clips to violent and bizarre actions. Some cases even take advantage of people's compassion, fabricating content of clips "asking for support to buy goods" because of difficult family circumstances, relatives with life-threatening illnesses, along with edited images showing extreme sadness. It is not difficult to find TikTok accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, created to attract viewers to "18+" pages, and many groups even have more advanced features such as watching "exclusive sex" videos, live sex if users pay a fee. Black services such as providing "sugar babies - using sex for money" are also thoroughly exploited by a group of young people to make quick profits.

Not only TikTok but also many applications on other social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram... are also exploited by some young people to make money. According to YouTube's report to the Ministry of Information and Communications, there is a lot of violating content mainly created by Vietnamese content creators such as pornography, inciting violence, cyber gangsters; encouraging gambling, drug use; harming children; using copyrighted music and images; many videos with toxic, nonsense, sensational content to attract a large number of viewers. Because they want these violating content to get through the censorship of Facebook, Google... digital content creators have come up with a series of tricks to deal with it. There are clips disguised as children's animations but containing adult content. There are videos disguised as selling fashion items to invite the purchase and sale of prohibited goods... To deal with the word censorship filter of social networks, "fence-breaking warriors" use words in a different way than prescribed to avoid automatic content censorship.

Just scroll through Facebook, YouTube, TikTok... and you will see a series of clips with bizarre content such as "Hang yourself but not die", "Challenge to be an animal for a day", "Troll pouring eggs on mother's head", "If you want to get rich quickly, just meet me", "You were not born to work", "Download the app and watch me show"... and clips full of violence and swearing from online gangsters... Recently, there has been a trend of NPC-live streaming to make money, each gift has a denomination, viewers must deposit money into the platform to buy, the larger the gift value, the more unique the action must be. In order to attract viewers to give them big gifts, livestreamers choose strange settings, accepting to follow the actions requested by viewers even if they are offensive or dangerous to themselves.

Earning hundreds to billions of dong on digital platforms has made many young people rush to make money at all costs. That is why the trend of making trashy clips has flourished and become more and more widespread recently, with the secret being that the more "sexy-shocking-cheesy" the more popular it is, even if it means sacrificing integrity, honor, conscience, morality, and even standing above the law to make money. This partly explains why trashy clips teaching "getting rich is not difficult" appeal to the psychology of this age group and have a tremendous appeal, making young people think that success only comes from people with a lot of money.

According to digital content creators, if there are no strong measures, the situation of dirty clips will continue to recur because of the attractive profits it brings. Young people are willing to accept fines if they are discovered to be in violation, then change to more sophisticated methods so that dirty videos can continue to make money on the internet.

Pragmatism guides action

In the pragmatic thinking of today's youth, money or material things in general always play a key role and decide all actions, having a lot of money means success. From choosing a school, career orientation, young people today tend to register for economic majors. That is the reason why during the admission season, although the annual standard scores of these schools are much higher than some other majors, they still attract a large number of candidates.

Units that do recruitment consulting and job introduction work all have the same opinion that, in recent years, almost every day, everywhere there is a question: Which major can you earn a lot of money after graduation? Meanwhile, what students need to care about is which major is suitable for their strengths and conditions, which is a secondary issue in their choice needs. Pursuing a major to get a good job with an attractive salary is not wrong, but the point to discuss here is the consequence of choosing a major that is not suitable for their abilities, causing many young people to graduate with the major they dreamed of but cannot apply it to work. The high recruitment demand, high salary, and generous bonuses of businesses and economic units have directly hit the psychology and tastes of young people, so like a chain reaction, year after year, a large number of candidates choose economics as a safe solution, ignoring their passion, interests, strengths, and true abilities.

Not only choosing a school or a course, some students are willing to drop out of school to rush into the path of making money early, making money quickly and making money by any means. In another group, the more work to make money while still in school also makes young people have no time to enjoy meaningful, memorable moments in their beautiful student years. Innocence, carefreeness, and purity are replaced by calculations of gains and losses and the fleeting dream of changing one's life in a moment. Pragmatic thinking and putting money above all life values are also the cause of forming a selfish, insensitive lifestyle, making young people become distant from precious spiritual values, family, and relatives.

Looking deeper from another angle, in friendships and love affairs, we also see that pragmatism is dominating many young people. Choosing friends or life partners based on financial criteria has become popular. The value of happiness, meaning, and love in life is weighed and measured by adding and subtracting profits and losses in relationships established through countless calculations.

( According to thesaigontimes.vn )

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