One Obscure Word Captures Urban China’s Unhappiness
sixthtone.com
sixthtone.com
An example in the west is having kids: it puts you on the hook for money, legal issues etc. You can forget entertaining the idea of stopping work to live a vagrant lifestyle (Kerouac style) as it will land you in jail due to child services and other "needs" invented by society.
Another example is Europe and the tech scene: I see many europeans here complaining from high taxes, low pay, and lack of unicorns. This is all tied together: if a european is a 100x engineer, they will barely get a 1.5 salary increase if they stay there - and even that 1.5 figure may be stretching truth, because they will be reminded by their boss that they salary must remain close to their co workers and below their boss. Tall poppy syndrome, society cohesion etc. all act in synergy to cause the end result that describe the European tech scene.
Likewise for healthcare in the US - you can only throw gasoline on the fire.
Involution is when change within the system is not possible unless a revolution happens - and you know it, but you are afraid of it, because the system is "good enough" as is, and change is dangerous, and most people are risk averse. It creates a special kind of apathy.
Most europeans like their safety net and free healthcare, and will not immigrate. Most americans like to think they can get the best healthcare money can with their large deductible, even if they could travel to Asia and get better quality care when they need it by paying out-of-pocket for less than a fraction of their fixed expenses. Most parents would never say they would prefer to be without kids, yet silently rejoice when the kids finally leave the home and they are free again - in their own home, 20 years after a bad decision.
At least China now correctly perceives the problem, which gives some hope it may be solved.
https://news.yahoo.com/why-chinese-youngsters-embracing-phil...
Sounds like the Chinese Dream which has just appeared in the past 25 years or so has already become increasingly difficult:
> The intense anxiety felt by younger people, and exacerbated by the pandemic, prompted a wider discussion on a once niche academic concept: neijuan. Translated as “involution,” the anthropological term was first applied to agriculture, and has come to describe conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs.
> Neijuan has become a hot topic on the Chinese internet and in media reports this year as a word that “captures urban China’s unhappiness.” Complaints of their work becoming too “involuted”—more competitive with little corresponding rewards—are as likely to be discussed on Weibo by white-collar workers as food delivery drivers.
> One example cited to illustrate the phenomenon is a notice in a Wuhan marketplace that forbade employment of female workers (link in Chinese) over the age of 45, and male workers over 50, citing the need to “upgrade” its services. In an “involuted” society, demand for work is so high that age and experience become liabilities. In another example, a student at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University was pictured typing on his laptop while riding on a bike. The pressure to stand out at this elite school has become so intense that even commuting has become an opportunity to maximize output.
> Shanghai-based Clarisse Zhang is one of the youngsters who feels they have missed out on a golden period, when simply working hard could mean a ticket to a better life. It's not hard to spot the similarities to the decline of the American Dream.
And yes, it's not specific to more capitalistic societies like America or China either. You make good points about the rather stagnant nature of Europe's tech industry. Also, the high youth unemployment in some countries of Europe is quite alarming, despite the presence of much stronger social safety nets than in the U.S. Japan despite all its wealth and technological innovation, has experienced economic and social stagnation for decades, and I believe there's similar hopelessness among the youth in Taiwan [0]. Even parts of South Korea is seeing this as deindustrialization begins to set in. [1]
Wonder why so much of the developed world is experiencing involution, even nations that have just 'made it' recently like (coastal) China, or the Asian Tigers. Rich countries are still getting richer, but their citizens are getting unhappier.
[0] https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/lost-ambition-taiwans-m...
The article properly describe how Japan has the same "disease", yet with different symptoms.
The cause is not capitalism, but uniform objectives prescribed by society and adopted by its people. If you accept them as an unmovable truth, you can not work on alternatives.
The McDonald example was another great piece: the student did the right thing (to keep trying the same thing while it fails and hoping for different results is a definition of insanity in the Simpsons joke), but even that was criticized. There is little hope people can find good solutions, if any attempts to do things differently is attacked.
> It's not hard to spot the similarities to the decline of the American Dream.
Indeed. The American Dream died in the 1960s, when "counter culture" was not recognized at its true value: an antidote to this involution.
The article you linked are interesting, but they give the wrong solution: giving up by touching fish (slacking at work) is not very fulfilling unless there is something else with meaning in your life. It is accepting the same narrative, and just inverting your response to this narrative, instead of creating your own.
Hopefully, China will manage its democratic transition better than America managed in counter culture. I have lots of hope, when I see accurate descriptions of the problem like this.
The McD example is definitely mirrored in the U.S. as rising unemployment for college graduates, the swelling numbers of college students, and increasing university tuitions all happen at the same time. And here too, many service employers would consider graduates as overqualified for their jobs. Hiring expectations- including in tech- often do reflect cultural perspectives and not necessarily economic realities.
I wouldn't go as far as to say the American Dream died until after the '70s or '80s, but certainly the '60s could be seen as lost potential to correct the course. However, I'm also drawn by Adam Curtis' thesis that the counterculture of the hippies, in contrast to the civil rights movement, focused too much on individualistic self-transformation and thus was unable to turn into a mass movement that could actually affect political, material change.
Touching fish isn't really meant to be a way to bring about systemic change, it's just how those who are suffering from 996 seek to cope with what they're put under. It does show there is somewhat of widespread dissatisfaction with what's going on under involution.
Totally. The problem is cultural first, as seen with the example of Japan education: it is Confuscian, but it fails in the same ways.
> Hiring expectations- including in tech- often do reflect cultural perspectives and not necessarily economic realities.
Indeed, unnecessary competition to just look like market competition.
> Touching fish isn't really meant to be a way to bring about systemic change, it's just how those who are suffering from 996 seek to cope with what they're put under
Check my username, I was one of the 996. It takes some wild out of the box thinking to escape a system that has embedded its values into you.
If it's investment, of course not. If it's an unlimited liability (like naked short sellers have recently learned!), not so.
I believe kids are closer to shorting GME that a sound and reasonable investment: most often it will work, but when it doesn't it will ruin you.
But I don't think you can express (or feel) buyer remorse after having kids. If that was even possible in humans, it would have been selected away by evolution.
> Having children is one of the most intangible investments anyone can make, both risk and reward maximized to the extreme not through capital but purpose and relationship
Sorry, but it's wrong: kids have a fixed costs (enforced by law, child services, alimony...) + extra possible costs (say rehab if they do drugs). On top of that, it anchors you in one place for at least 18 years. Then you may feel morally compelled to pay further (college etc).
Seems like a bad bet to me, as purpose and relationship are not guaranteed.
What if they abandon you after all you have invested? Using the same amounts of money to hire maids etc will give you a guarantee of service, and nobody will think any worse of you for firing an underperforming maid.
Anyway, children has the same problem as the other things mentioned: having kids is what everyone wants (like the other examples in the article: a good carrier and over 100 sq meter flat in China, education in Japan...) so it entraps you.
> I see the article as pointing to a lack of overall guiding purpose more than anything else, something that can't really be said for having children.
Then I hope you will never agree with me!
We all reap the benefits of that as the economies of scale drive down costs for consumers, thus making more advancement possible. We don't talk about the downsides, though.
This is one of the major ones. If there are 1,000 people in your town, each of them is .1% of the vote, and is probably .1% of the revenue for each business. If a business does something you don't like, you can ding them for .1% of their revenue. If you get upset and convince 9 other people, that's a 1% decrease in revenue. If you can convince 500 other people, you have a majority, and can pass legislation to ban what that business is doing. We're talking numbers of people where you can launch a grassroots campaign with posterboard in yards; you could probably run a successful campaign for less than $1,000.
If you have to change a county-level company, now you're suddenly 1 out of 100,000 people. Getting 500 people to agree with you does nothing. It's 0.5% of their customers, the same impact as if you, your SO, and 2 children stopped visiting the shop. Go up to the state level and you're no longer even a blip.
The money you need in order to conduct a campaign goes up exponentially as well. I don't know what a statewide campaign costs, but I'm fair confident it's far, far beyond what any individual or small group of individuals can come up with.
The end result is that this isn't a feeling, this is a reality. We, individually, wield less power over our communities than we ever have in the past because our communities have grown to be far larger than they were in the past. That dilutes the control we have, as the percentage of the revenue or votes you constitute goes down.
I think we would do better with smaller communities that have more control. I think the weed laws are an okay example of that. The federal government has gone hands off and delegated that choice to the states. States where they choose to allow it typically don't force it; they allow local communities to keep it illegal if they would like. If some small town think it's going to be bad for them, they can choose to keep it illegal. I disagree with them, but I respect that that's what they want for their community.
My inner cynic, however, is telling me that China will not become fat and lazy like America until it gains more geopolitical power and therefore more easily accesses resources and goods in proportion to it's enormous population.
Optimistically, in the future, a new type of more sophisticated and sustainable high-tech global monetary and economic system can provide some breathing room and reduce resource conflicts.
Fortunately a "revolution" in this context just means a rewrite.
Word usage is a social phenomenon. If people feel the word “involution” expresses their anxieties, it’s on us (scholars) to listen carefully and then work out what’s going on. It’s not our job to tell people they can’t use certain words.
An ironic quote, given the nature of this publication:
Sixth Tone is an online magazine owned by the Shanghai United Media Group, a state media company controlled by the Shanghai committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
The irony of the name "Chinese Communist Part" just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
I'm struck, honestly, by how similar modern society in China is to that in the U.S. (perhaps moreso the U.S. of the 20th century), at least when it comes to the rat race and the endless push for individual signifiers of success and the burgeoning disillusionment with it all