Last night, just before bed, my younger sister asked to borrow living expenses from me. My sister is a seamstress and her husband is a renovation worker. Before the pandemic, the couple's combined monthly income was over ten thousand yuan, and in good months over twenty thousand. My sister has two children; their income was enough to support the two children and even to buy a house and a car in the county town. But because of the pandemic, her husband's renovation work has repeatedly stalled, and the factory where my sister works cannot pay wages. They still have a mortgage to repay, so it has finally come to the point where they must borrow living expenses from me, their older brother.This year, besides my sister, my sister-in-law also borrowed living expenses from my wife; the factory where she worked could not hold on and closed early, leaving the workers with no income. My brother-in-law recently had kidney stones and, unable to afford treatment, also borrowed from my wife. We are in Beijing; my wife works in education, her income is unaffected, the three of us are healthy, and we have few expenses, so we are comparatively better off. When our younger siblings are in dire straits, they borrow a little from us to tide them over.Our family's situation may be a microcosm of many Chinese households. My wife has five siblings and I have three; we all belong to the large families born in the family-planning era when limits were exceeded, and the siblings get along harmoniously and help one another in hardship—for which we especially thank our parents, who had the courage in that era to have more children so that we would not be left isolated and helpless. Some people I know have been getting by during this difficult period on online loans, and some have already sunk into the whirlpool of online lending, unable to extricate themselves.This is not unique to China. A survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau in early May this year shows that about 25.6 million American adults had to borrow money from friends and relatives to get by in 2022—a marked increase from the 19.1 million a year earlier.So the country has truly reached the point where it must relax pandemic controls to save the economy, because not every household has a guaranteed income. I see some people still hoping the policy will return to the earlier "fortress-and-scorched-earth" state; how unrealistic that is. Countless families are already on the brink, and poverty befriends change—a truth as old as history. If society is to enjoy long-term stability, it must consider the survival of the common people; otherwise it will provoke popular unrest.Around New Year's Day 2022 I wrote that Omicron would be a watershed in this pandemic, and that from 2022 onward countries around the world would have to change their strategies and enter the post-pandemic era. China's influence on the world is pivotal; only when our country changed its strategy could the world truly be said to have entered the post-pandemic era. So our recent policy shift is a milestone in the world's overall move into that era.The pandemic's impact on the economy is plain for all to see, but it is not the only factor. Because global economic development is seriously unbalanced, and because of humankind's excesses, our world already had many problems before the pandemic—economic, social, and climate crises were all severe.How unbalanced is economic development? If everyone on Earth lived at the American standard, we would need six planets to support the global population; but if everyone lived at the Indian standard, 0.8 of a planet would suffice. Within the United States itself, many people in the once-glorious Rust Belt have lost their livelihoods and had to set aside their former dignity to live on social assistance.There is imbalance between developed and developing countries, and also huge imbalances within each. That is why in recent years we have seen populism rising across the globe, which some dismiss as an irrational anti-intellectual tendency. But reason can exist only in a basically balanced society; when there is severe imbalance, many people sink into despair and anger because of hardship—that is an inevitable law of social development. Seeing this is what counts as rationality; anything else is just another form of prejudice.Severe imbalance tears society apart, flooding it with hate and hateful speech, emboldening extremist trends, and bringing war and upheaval back to the world. Society then falls into a vicious cycle, and at this moment we humans living on Earth in the twenty-first century are caught in exactly that vicious cycle.During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his famous speech "We Shall Fight on the Beaches," saying: "We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills."Today, the divided people of the world are reenacting the scenes of that speech in another form. Conflict is everywhere, and turmoil is spreading from one country to another, from one city to another. The IMF predicts that about half of Europe's economies will fall into recession next year. Global economists are broadly pessimistic about next year's world economy, and economic depression will inevitably sharpen social contradictions further. So at least for next year, our world will not yet see peace and prosperity. Even after China opens up, it will take about a year to walk out of the pandemic; during this period we should not hold too many unrealistic expectations. Next year may be somewhat better than this year, but I doubt it will be much better.Since the Industrial Revolution, humankind has become ever more immoderate. On December 6, 2022, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the opening of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada, that humankind now treats nature like a toilet, that humanity itself has become a "weapon of mass extinction," and that human activity is causing species on Earth to dwindle at an unprecedented pace—a behavior for which humanity itself will pay a heavy price.We now live on a warm, wet planetary surface where the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is just right for life and effectively prevents excessive evaporation of surface liquid water. But during the first 700 million years after Earth formed, its atmosphere was acidic and dominated by carbon dioxide, and no life could have arisen. It was the proliferation of photosynthetic autotrophs—cyanobacteria, planktonic algae, and green plants—that changed the composition of Earth's atmosphere and made our planet teem with life.But since the Industrial Revolution, we humans are destroying all of this with our own hands. The comfortable life we crave has caused excessive carbon-dioxide emissions, so that in recent years the climate crisis has deepened. This year we endured an unforgettable summer of heat and drought, but I believe this is only the beginning. Once an ecosystem is destroyed, it too falls into a vicious cycle. In 2023 we may witness more extreme climate events.The pandemic is only a catalyst; it has inflamed humankind's deeper problems and sharpened every contradiction. In the post-pandemic era, economic, social, and climate crises will intertwine with public-health problems to test all of humanity together, leading to chaos and war.As one of the masses, what I long for is peace and safety. As an old Chinese saying goes, better to be a dog in a peaceful age than a human in troubled times. Seeing the present plight of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, we should take warning: those of us living in the twenty-first century are not far from upheaval.Every stratum of society should learn compromise, concession, and coexistence, rather than standing swords drawn against one another. Any speech that promotes confrontation and hatred should be resisted by all. Everyone should also learn to live more moderately and consciously protect our ecological environment; only then can we slowly walk out of this string of crises.This article waives copyright; anyone may repost it freely.