* YMMV. You might need to live in a developed world that assures you won't be left to die, that is not at war, that you can find a way to sustain yourself, and that you're not involved in any accidents that drastically change your otherwise simple life.
In fact, all the complexity appears when there is peace. People do not save or study or anything secondary when there is war.
Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is? When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed? When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that. A kid without beard with an automatic gun does not like or respect you? You are dead.
People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died. Nobody gave a dam. Cars were circulating as usual around the dead person. It was the most brutal thing I ever saw in my life, including Congo, in Congo people cared more about each other.
It is the developed world that is complex and sophisticated. People work for abstract things like "career", "pensions", "tenure" or even paper money that are promises that don't really exist as real things but really are symbols of trust in the society.
BTW you feel alive living at the moment and I personally miss some part of that, even when I was risking my life.
Dying is simple, life living is harder.
That is not actually true. Most people in war zone are civilians without weapons. The survival depends a lot on navigating power structures and negotiating. And luck. But it is not simple and everyone speculates.
> When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed?
How exactly would you protect them? You don't. Cause I had relatives survive war and read memoirs from civilians and it was more that everyone was looking for source of income. If males had to join army or guerilla (or died), then it is women trying to survive and trying to care for those who stayed (children, old, themselves). And that is not simple.
> Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is?
Hardly. But school systems in war countries and occupied countries do somehow move on, as malfunctioning as they are. People leave them to search for income and food. People clinge on activites too.
Mental health issues get worst under those conditions. The conflicts between people escalate while everyone being even more dependent on each other. People live in cramped conditions. And none of that is simple. Living in one household with mentally ill or abusive relative you would normally cut off is opposite of simple.
> When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
Majority are civilians.
Status is something we choose to opt-in to. You can choose to ignore it as well.
What would you need to see to conclude that life in China for local people is as complex as for American living in United States?
I am not even differencing rural part of old school China from rich inhabitant of Beijing.