Summary

张策’s core dilemma is not a lack of commercial success, but that his successful IP has become his income stream, fortress, and prison at the same time. He first left The Boring Life of 朱一旦 and has now “temporarily left” Stories from the Plaza; established characters, fan demand, and steady brand work keep calling him back, but his creative drive is spent. “That fortress may be both your fortress and your tomb.”
A breakout does not appear from nowhere; it is the nonlinear payoff from years of trial and error finally meeting the right format. Before The Boring Life of 朱一旦, 张策 had already spent 1.5 years making workplace dramas; while recording a Bilibili course in 2020, he reverse-engineered his own method and finally understood “where luck comes from.” Stories from the Plaza began as an advertising concept he abandoned after the client dragged him through repeated meetings, then became a Bilibili Lunar New Year project; it went viral on the third day of the holiday, after which brand deals began pouring in.
The commercial success of Stories from the Plaza came from a rare alignment between creative appetite and advertising demand, but the same mechanism also accelerated the depletion of his material. Brands began specifying the style and subject matter, and 张策 kept feeding his inventory of techniques, conflicts, twists, and jokes into the IP; 1-2 years later, he realized that continuing meant copying himself. “The job was done, the money was made—but whenever I looked at it, I felt suffocated.”
Traffic does not truly distort professional standards; it distorts the coordinate system creators use to judge a work’s value. 卫诗婕 distinguishes between giving every work everything you have and insisting that the result cannot fall from the pantheon: when clients, platforms, fans, and media all judge by traffic, creators mistake declining attention for declining ability. 张策 acknowledges that what trapped him was not high standards themselves, but “an obsession with the result” and the fear of losing what he had.
When creative work monetizes far more efficiently than ordinary labor, wealth can erode the creator’s scarcest asset: the ability to feel ordinary life. Riding an electric bike around the city and observing people became being driven door-to-door; understanding what RMB5,000 or RMB10,000 a month meant became earning that kind of money in a week. 张策 began to fear standing atop a tower of fame and fortune, “using binoculars to look at the human world,” before returning to a “velvet bed” to write about hardship he only imagined he understood. “I forgot them. I forgot the person I used to be.”
2 creations made without the burden of expectations produced outsized returns. He filmed a clothing-store worker at Shunyi Airport on his phone, expecting 500K-1M views; it reached 4M-5M. He later visited a rural soccer primary school in Yunnan with roughly 200 students, attracting CCTV attention as well as funding for the school’s reconstruction and new building. The common condition was not expensive production, but that “no one expected anything from it”; content built on chance encounters and lived experience is difficult to reproduce at industrial efficiency.
For 张策, moving into film is not an upgrade of his IP but a high-uncertainty career migration and experiment. 贾樟柯 told him, “You’re changing industries, not upgrading”; 卫诗婕 also pushed back on the idea that “only film can survive,” arguing that Stories from the Plaza, the saleswoman, and the soccer school could all outlast their moment. 张策 still wants to try once, while admitting that a film may be less affecting than a phone recording made on the street. What he really needs is to “forget what you want to get.”

Deep dive

1. Viral success built a fortress of fame and fortune—and cut him off from real feedback

卫诗婕 compared the post-viral condition to walls that keep rising around a creator: honors cover every side, other people look up to him and treat him with deference, and communication requires an increasingly thick mask. 张策 later reduced the fortress to fame and fortune.
卫诗婕 asked whether he was willing to punch a hole through that fortress. 张策 acknowledged that fame and fortune mean more than money: they also bring the psychological gratification of being praised and treated as a role model. Even after repeatedly warning himself to stay clear-headed, “this thing changes shape in a thousand ways—you can’t quit it.”
His wife sees the danger more directly: when everyone worships his strength, he no longer permits his weak self to appear. Once placed on a pedestal, he cannot climb back down. 张策 believes that unless he breaks through the fortress and migrates to a new oasis, “that fortress may be both your fortress and your tomb.”

2. Leaving a mature IP means abandoning both security and real people

卫诗婕 summarized 张策’s experience as 2 choices: giving up The Boring Life of 朱一旦 and, more recently, leaving Stories from the Plaza. 张策 carefully corrected her, saying the latter was only a temporary departure and that he had not completed the withdrawal. The established characters and universe still pull him back, leading him to graft every new subject onto the old format.
The cast of Stories from the Plaza consisted of older rural men and women. The show gave them their dream of becoming actors; even without pay, they were willing to keep playing along with “Director 策.” When they asked, “Why aren’t we shooting anymore?”, the answer 张策 could not say outright was: “I’m not happy anymore. I can’t make anything happy when I’m no longer happy myself.”
That guilt means migration is not simply a matter of stopping production. The old characters are real people who call, meet him, and expect something from him; but the original enthusiasm was exhausted in that phase, and returning may produce nothing but repetition.

3. Pessimism keeps him moving—and turns every victory into immediate pressure

张策 said he had “always been a painful person, and a pessimistic person.” Whenever a work goes viral, his first reaction is not celebration but: “It’s over. Everyone’s expectations just got higher, and my work will be harder from here.”
The pattern goes back to his school days. He improved from routinely ranking seventh or 10th to ranking second; when he came fourth on the next test and was initially pleased, his mother reminded him that he had ranked second last time. “A person has to surpass who they were before, right?” became an internal command not to enjoy success and never to relax.
Asked about the “half a glass of water in the desert,” he rejected the standard answer that optimism always wins. A pessimist might make it out because he rations carefully; both people might also die—the difference being that one dies optimistically and the other pessimistically. 卫诗婕 pointed out that he did not actively choose pessimism; he simply never developed another psychological route.

4. Breakouts came from long accumulation—and an accidental opening after a client walked away

After leaving The Boring Life of 朱一旦, 张策 set up a company and began recording a Bilibili course in 2020. Looking back, he realized he had already accumulated 1.5 years of workplace dramas before The Boring Life of 朱一旦: the format was wrong, but that did not mean there had been nothing before the breakout.
A gaming company once commissioned an 8-episode first-person period drama to be shot before Lunar New Year, but only 3 episodes had been written when filming began. The team scouted locations and shot during the day, then wrote new material at night. 张策 thought the finished work was “terrible”; when he rewatched it a year later, he thought it was good. By the time the final episode aired, the account had 1M followers.
The early version of Stories from the Plaza was a Lunar New Year ad for a major internet company: with the pandemic keeping young people in cities, rural parents at a mahjong table used a “lower first, then raise” structure to humblebrag about their children. After 3 rounds of meetings, 张策 abandoned the deal despite its fee being several times that of a normal commercial, removed the brand name, and turned it into a Bilibili New Year Gala project. Bilibili replied that day: “Fine, shoot it.”
The project exploded after launching on the third day of Lunar New Year. The cast came from 曹姨 and her sisters 大鹅 and 二花, whom 张策 had met while making the period drama. At first, he only thought their dialects worked and that they could get the job done; “of course I never thought she would become famous.”

5. “Where there are people, there is a jianghu”: observation became a commercial flywheel

The second creative breakthrough came from a story about his mother rushing to a square-dance session because she was afraid that arriving late would leave her at the back of the line. 张策 suddenly realized that “where there are people, there is a jianghu,” and filmed the dance troupe as a Hong Kong triad-style power structure.
Another major internet company disliked the advertising script, and the partnership ended. 张策 then shot the project himself, and it went viral again. From the second episode onward, brands began requesting this style and subject matter by name; commercial work and the things he actually wanted to make had achieved a rare overlap.
His method was not mysterious: take the structure of a classic work or a hot topic and reweave it around his own characters. Once an audience arrived, clients naturally taught creators “how to take the work, how to make it, and how to make money from them.” The loop lasted 1-2 years.
But the flywheel consumed its fuel. Techniques, jokes, surprises, conflicts, and reversals were all poured into the same IP until 张策 felt that he had “nothing new left to give everyone.” Continuing meant repetition.

6. Replicating success can deliver ads, but not creative pleasure

One client demanded an Avengers-style project. 张策 wrote it using his old method but found it uninteresting because “when you ask me to copy the classics I made before, I just can’t produce them.” The project was delivered and the money arrived, but watching the finished piece still left him feeling suffocated.
A Xiaomi phone campaign marked a clear turning point. After finishing the script, he told his team, “I don’t want to shoot this. I don’t want this money.” He eventually forced himself to complete it, and the result was even good, which only underscored the split between external feedback and his internal response.
张策 never treated brand work as routine labor. He invested his entire self in every project, became so anxious that he lost his hair, and even had thoughts of “wanting to be hit by a car.” That is why the decision to leave took a year, with him wavering between going back, giving up, and wanting to return, until he finally acted.
Some companies view an account as a time-limited asset: finish one cycle, then replicate the model with a new account, reusing even the scripts and actors. 张策 said those people had “figured it out,” while he could not—he was unwilling to give up either the income or the expression.

7. Traffic compressed quality into a single lowest-common denominator

卫诗婕 rejected the idea that the problem was simply “setting the bar too high.” Taking every project seriously is professional discipline; what obstructs creation is tying full commitment to the process to a result that “must not fall from the pantheon.”
She separated 2 kinds of results. One is the creator’s professional judgment of the work itself; the other is reach, praise, and recognition. The 2 do not always align today, but clients, platforms, fans, and media all look at traffic, so creators interpret below-target traffic as “I’m getting worse.”
张策 accepted the diagnosis: “Extremely high expectations plus extremely high standards” was not the whole story; the core problem was his inability to bear gains and losses. The breakout works were also built on pain, insecurity, criticism, and long periods of obscurity. Remember only the victories, and every future project begins to feel as if it must succeed.
After arriving in Beijing, he forced himself to prepare a new script that he knew was “not good.” When someone auditioning said it felt disjointed, he accepted the criticism. The new project had no money and everything was uncertain; the pain came from his fixation on the outcome. If he could set the outcome aside first, he might recover the ability to act.

8. The efficiency mindset of high income is eroding the life experience his work depends on

张策 used to enjoy riding an electric bike around with no destination, stopping whenever he saw someone interesting. Once work became busy, a driver took him directly from home to the office, as if time had become too expensive to waste. Being able to generate a large income in 1 week also meant having no energy left to experience the world.
A darker thought frightened him: seeing other people work hard for little money, he worried that he might start questioning the value of their effort. After 卫诗婕 confirmed what she had heard, he clarified that he was not questioning “the meaning of being alive”; he was realizing that he was losing the scale needed to understand the value of ordinary labor.
The image that terrified him most was a director standing atop a tower of fame and fortune, occasionally “using binoculars to look at the human world,” then hurrying back to a “velvet bed” to write about hardship he only imagined he understood—and using his reputation to secure investment and make garbage.
He had not originally set out to speak for ordinary people; he simply found their lives interesting. His work depended on observing ordinary characters and understanding what lives on RMB5,000 versus RMB10,000 a month actually looked like. After entering a more affluent life and a new value system, he said: “I forgot them. I forgot the person I used to be. That’s why my work has become harder and harder.”

9. Truly “inefficient” experiences brought back the highest density of reality

卫诗婕 put the choice bluntly: a subject might require 1 month of local immersion, while a few online articles could still produce a very good film. Commercial logic naturally favors the latter. 张策 chose fieldwork because only the process itself might allow him to feel happy again.
He used The Boring Life of 朱一旦 as a comparison. The time needed to make 1 film about older men and women would be enough to produce more than 10 or even 20 episodes of The Boring Life of 朱一旦. If the old business were still running, he would never choose the former. “I had to cut it off. Once I couldn’t go back, once there was no road back, I had no choice.”
Physical hardship was not the obstacle. The harder things to escape were the time cost, energy cost, and profit-driven efficiency mindset. Once every subject is grafted onto a mature universe and judged by traffic, the creator is trapped in a “vicious cycle” with no exit.

10. Unplanned phone footage brought back the happiness of ordinary people

Before going to Yunnan, a fan told 张策, “I want to watch anything you shoot.” The remark relaxed him. Later, while buying T-shirts at Shunyi Airport, he was pulled into a sales pitch by an enthusiastic shop assistant; he ended up spending about RMB2,000 on 10 pieces of clothing and hearing her life story.
The woman had come to Beijing from a small town. After giving birth, she suffered depression and attempted suicide by cutting her wrists; she returned home to recover, then left her child with relatives because she did not want to spend her entire life in the town. Working in clothing sales, she earned only RMB3 commission per item—about RMB3 per RMB100 sold—but remained relentlessly positive.
张策 filmed the encounter on his phone and titled it I Would Rather Be in Pain Than Numb. He expected 500K-1M views; it reached 4M-5M. More importantly, he had “no baggage at all” while making it. The story stood on its own first; traffic was only something that happened afterward.
The same state carried into Yunnan. He refused the other side’s offer to pay for flights and hotels because he did not want the psychological debt of having to deliver a film. Participating as an ordinary attendee rather than as “Director 小策,” he discovered that “the version of me that isn’t creating is valuable too.”

11. Family responsibilities cannot be avoided; film is a career-switch experiment

This migration was not purely an artistic choice. 卫诗婕 pointed out that 张策 has a wife and child. His wife is both his partner and his manager, and hopes fans, media, and the public will accept him as a husband, father, and ordinary middle-aged man who needs to support a family; she also sees that he remains trapped by outside judgment.
The roughly 200-student rural primary school in Yunnan won the provincial soccer championship, moving 张策 to make A Magical-Realist Soccer Primary School. The work later attracted CCTV attention, and the school received state support, reconstruction assistance, and funding for a new school building. 张策 still does not dare return because he cannot bring more value and is afraid of creating expectations.
After turning to film, he became stuck in the long process from subject selection to outline. 卫诗婕 thought he was too restrained, fearful, and insecure; 张策 attributed the problem to the expectations he had set for himself. 贾樟柯 offered an accurate diagnosis: “We work in 2 different industries. You’re changing industries, not upgrading.” 张策 therefore began considering whether he should throw away everything he had and start again.
He does not want to become 贾樟柯, and believes that in the self-media era there is already enough expression from ordinary people. His goal is to be a commercial director and make “films that make everyone happy.” His fixation on film comes from its completeness and staying power, but 卫诗婕 pushed back: Stories from the Plaza, the saleswoman, and the soccer school could also have documentary value and survive for 20 or 30 years.
张策 ultimately accepted that the contradiction would not disappear. A film might consume enormous effort and still be less relaxed and affecting than a phone recording made on the street; the next generation might not even have the habit of going to cinemas. But if he never tried, he would regret it. Internal conflict was no longer simply a pejorative—it was more like 2 voices coexisting through the changing seasons, pushing him out of an unhappy safe zone: “Forget what you want to get,” and go do it first.

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