Many Chinese people say: "If all else fails, I'll just deliver food." But do you know? According to the latest public data, the actual demand for Chinese food delivery orders is about 4 million people, while the number of people who have entered the real-time delivery system is already close to 20 million. You might also say: "I have a car, I might as well drive for ride-hailing." But many cities have already started issuing saturation warnings for transportation capacity. Some cities have hundreds of thousands of licensed drivers competing for limited orders. An average of ten or more orders per day has become the norm.

The issue is no longer whether delivering food is feasible. It’s not about whether driving for ride-hailing is feasible. Instead: everyone thinks that place is a way out. But they find: all escape routes ultimately lead to the same entrance.
The reason why past refuges were refuges was not because the work was easy, but because there were few people. When unemployed people go there, failed entrepreneurs go there, shrinking industries go there, and recent graduates also go there, that place ceases to be a refuge.
Many people have not yet realized one thing. Food delivery and ride-hailing once represented: society’s last mobility. Education level doesn’t matter, age doesn’t matter, background doesn’t matter. Today, you register today and make money tomorrow. So people mistakenly think: "As long as I’m willing to work hard, there’s always a way."
But as more and more people flood in simultaneously, the problem begins to change. It’s not that there are no roads. It’s that: the roads still exist, but they can no longer accommodate everyone. More and more people are starting to treat the same industry as their last insurance in life. And when a society has too many people relying on the same insurance at the same time, the insurance itself will fail.
What truly causes unease is not: that food delivery is full, or ride-hailing is full. It’s that: the "last escape route" in people’s minds is shifting from unlimited capacity to limited capacity.
When even the last escape route begins to clog, what people lose is no longer job options, but a sense of certainty about the future.