Egg freezing isn't extracting your youth, it's taking out the eggs you were wasting
A woman releases twenty-odd eggs a month and uses only one; egg freezing retrieves the batch that would otherwise be wasted, not the four hundred of the future drawn down in advance — so it doesn't diminish your youth, it moves your life's deadline.
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Before freezing eggs, women live inside a deadline
Tan Jing (谈婧) says that before freezing her eggs, no matter how professional she looked on the outside, internally there was always a deadline — around age 38 egg quality drops sharply, an irreversible loss of capability. People work backward from that deadline: by what age you must marry, by what age you must have a child, or there's no way back. She describes that state as ‘you sit down and it feels like going to an interview, like other people are picking you’, positioned as the one being chosen in both the workplace and intimate relationships. This subconscious clock shapes how she judges and chooses her life's value.
— Tan JingAfter freezing eggs, the switch of agency flips on
Freezing her eggs was equivalent to moving the deadline away. She was 33 at the time, and suddenly felt there were still 60-plus years ahead to do things, so instead she had to choose — she couldn't just do one thing. With the constraint removed, psychologically and in terms of confidence ‘anything goes’, and she began to think about what she actually wanted and how she wanted to walk through life, feeling that everything else could be chosen. She calls this shift the rise of what feminism often stresses as ‘agency’ — when interacting with people around her, who chooses whom, whether she is active or passive, all of it gradually changed.
— Tan JingThe most painful part isn't the injections, it's the moment of deciding
The injections gave her morning sickness that lasted a week; every day even drinking water made her want to throw up, and she could only feel less awful by playing white noise. Every two days the dosage was adjusted, needles into her belly, until there wasn't a patch of good skin left on it. But she says the most painful part was the deciding — deciding in July or August, actually doing it only in January or February; at the moment of decision she was in a Shanghai KTV crying with a friend, feeling ‘I was always the top good student, how did I end up like this on the marriage track’. She explains this as inertia: from childhood she was expected to score high, find a good job, be a good wife and mother, and within those expectations she felt she was simply failing the exam.
— Tan JingEgg freezing is an employee benefit at Silicon Valley tech companies
Tan Jing says egg freezing is an especially mature technology, and assisted reproduction as a whole is now very mature; the side effects may just be slightly irregular periods or a bit of weight gain, which comes off easily. In Silicon Valley, egg freezing is an employee benefit at tech companies — work at Apple or Google and you can freeze for free, the company buys the insurance for you, so this cohort does it a lot; some Wall Street financial firms have the benefit too. She recommends doing the whole cycle in the US, because the ecosystem is mature, and if you do half in China and the last few injections abroad the dosage is hard to manage. The whole cost is about 100,000 RMB, including flights and hotel.
— Tan JingAn anti-marriage act instead opened up her view of marriage
Before freezing her eggs, including before filming the documentary, she felt she didn't need marriage, that work alone was enough. But after doing this thing that looks against marriage, she became especially open to intimate relationships and began to feel their beauty, and recently started dating. In retrospect she says her past intimate relationships, like her appearance, were in a state of being sized up and gazed at, not natural, not arising from within, all external conditions, so they could hardly bring true enjoyment; once all those external conditions were stripped away, she could instead enjoy the beauty that intimacy itself brings.
— Tan JingTwo years of pandemic cut the world into three closed loops
The most interesting thing she found from her travels: after two years of pandemic, everyone was sealed inside their own country and culture, and the world has clearly become polarized. After the US, Europe and Asia each slowed down for two years, each formed a complete closed-loop narrative and logic — the US has its own set, Europe is telling the anti-capitalist, anti-development set, Asia has its own set, and every place is very much its own closed loop. Specifically for Web3: the US gathers the world's most imaginative, most cross-disciplinary founders, with capital capability at the top of the food chain; Europe throws up social innovation ideas like carbon neutrality and mind-body-spirit; Asia gathers a large number of coders enjoying a low cost of living, with gaming and social ecosystems well developed.
— Tan JingVietnam looks like China twenty or thirty years ago
Asked which country excites her most, she answers Vietnam. The reason is that Vietnam is especially like China twenty or thirty years ago, also a communist country, and the look of its cities takes her back to her childhood. She met quite a few people from Web3 and Web2 startups and tech companies, and found that young people there are all especially hungry, especially eager to rise, with light in their eyes; the level of basic education is relatively high compared with other Southeast Asian countries, talent density is high, there has long been experience doing outsourcing for foreign companies, and the internationalization of the people is also decent by Southeast Asian standards. She met TikTok's team and teams from Tencent-like publishing companies, and the look of the offices and the style of the people were quite similar to China and Silicon Valley. Overall she is bullish on Vietnam, but not limited to the Web3 track.
— Tan JingFTX blowing up is a good thing in the long run
She judges that in the short term there will certainly be more chain reactions — funds deeply tied to FTX like MultiCoin and Genesis have all shown more or less funding problems, and there may be more blowups. But in the long run it's a good thing: first, in the previous cycle all behavior revolved around trade, and trade whose underlying asset value was not very clear — the underlying asset was small but the bubble blown on top of it was huge, which is not healthy; once trade is challenged, other financial applications like payments and asset management have more room. Second, this is an intermediate step in the industry's iteration — experts go in to handle assets and look at corporate governance, and find management failures at a very childish level; these aren't appearing for the first time, the last cycle also had projects using the naive idea that ‘if the quantity of money stays fixed it can resist inflation’, violating the most basic economic principles.
— Tan JingIn their own words · checked verbatim
Internally there's always a deadline, a deadline sitting there, it has a biological clock
内在始终会有一个截止日期 一个deadline在那里 它有一个biological clock
Tan Jing13:56
You finish and it feels like going to an interview, like other people are picking you, saying you're this old, right, if you marry, one of the one-two-three-four-five isn't good, if you don't marry, then it's such and such — basically you're in a state of being picked
你做完就像去面试的那种感觉 就别人来挑你 说你这么大年龄了 对吧 你要是结婚的话 有一二三四五之中不好 你要是不结婚的话 就怎么怎么样 基本上就是被挑的状态
Tan Jing15:06
I felt I was always the top good student, how did I end up like this on the marriage track, so miserable, fallen this low
就觉得以前都是最优秀的好学生 在婚姻这条赛道上面怎么搞成这样子 这么凄惨 沦落成这样
Tan Jing18:29
If what Web1 and Web2 transmit is information, then what Web3 transmits is actually money
如果说Web1和Web2上面传输的是信息的话 那么Web3上面传输的其实是钱
Tan Jing38:21
I've actually been running around the globe these past months, and my very big feeling is that globalization is still happening, it's happening in another place, it's actually not happening in these things between China and the US, but in the world of Web3 it is unprecedentedly globalized
我其实这段时间在全球跑 我的特别大的感受就是觉得全球化它依然在发生 它发生在另外一个地方 其实它没有发生在我们中美之间发生的这些事上面 但就是在Web3的这个世界里面 它是前所未有的全球化的
Tan Jing43:23
The idea that if there's code, risk can definitely be reduced, that code is more reliable than people — these ideas are probably a process of getting slapped in the face
就认为有代码 就一定能降低风险 代码比人可靠 这些想法 可能就是被打脸的 一个过程
Tan Jing57:28
A woman ovulates not just one egg per month, basically 20-plus, so if you freeze your eggs, you're not turning the future 400-plus eggs into ones taken out today, but taking out the eggs you were originally wasting, so there's no such thing as diminishing your youth
女性每个月排卵 不止一个卵子 有基本上20多个 所以你如果动卵的话 不是把未来的400多个卵子 变成今天取出来了 而是把你原来被浪费掉的卵子 拿了出来 所以不会存在 把你的青春折损这件事情
Tan Jing1:04:31
Figures
| Length of injections for one egg-freezing cycle | About 3 weeks | 20:57 |
| Total cost of egg freezing | About 100,000 RMB (including flights and hotel) | 22:22 |
| Number of eggs that must be frozen to ensure two children in the future | About 20 | 20:09 |
| Tan Jing's age when she froze her eggs | 33 | 14:35 |
| Number of articles Tan Jing wrote after freezing her eggs | About 22 | 13:05 |
| Web3's current penetration rate is equivalent to the internet in | 95 to 98 | 53:28 |
| Number of eggs a woman ovulates per month | 20-plus | 1:04:31 |
| Number of eggs a woman has in her lifetime | 400-plus | 1:04:31 |
Glossary
- biological clock
- The psychological deadline of a woman's fertility declining with age.
- product market fit
- The state in which a product truly meets market demand and can land.
- venture doubt
- A small group of individual investors gathering, each putting in money, each making their own judgment, investing together.
- Network States
- A book envisioning entities and governance rules formed on the internet that transcend the nation-state.
- crypto house
- A big house where people working in different areas of crypto live together, cooking and discussing together.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in women's career choices, egg-freezing decisions, and the global Web3 ecosystem, especially those watching personal investment trends.
34:14 to 35:14 has a stretch of garbled transcription, skippable.