2021年6月24日
Brian Wong
EJ Insight
The putative case for lying down
A recent phenomenon has taken China by storm – more specifically, it has gained substantial traction amongst the country’s youth and millennials. “Lying down” denotes a mixture of anti-materialist minimalism, and the pursuit of contentment independent of success along external, “objective” dimensions.
The outlook arose as a responsive strategy towards the surging “involution” in Chinese society – an inward-looking vicious cycle of counterproductive competition, that amounts to little more than a structural and structured trap of human capital, coerced and driven to perform all sorts of inane tasks and work, as a means of staying alive in the hamster wheel. And indeed, stayin’ alive is by no means easy, with the rising living costs, increasingly competitive work environment, and precipitously narrowing options for many lower-middle and grassroots youth in the country. ...
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