Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family
So… there’ll be a lot of great Chinese punk music soon?
Yeah. China’s speed running to true communism at a pace I wasn’t expecting. There’s a legitimate chance for the elimination of scarcity of basic goods in China “soon”, which would lead to a flourishing of the arts.
摆烂 bai3lan4
A slang term that means “stop striving”, I’d say it’s loosely akin to the phrase “quiet quitting” but a bit more general.
Fuck yeah China! (not the government)
Also referenced in the article was the phrase 'tang ping’ (lying flat, 躺平)
One of the behavioralist psychologists, I think it was Pavlov, ran an experiment on dogs where he shocked them for both bad behavior good.
Eventually, the shocks had no effect.
Leaned hopelessness. Can’t escape the effect regardless of your efforts so eventually you stop trying
Damn I feel that
deleted by creator
It was Martin Seligman who did dog shock experiments and developed the theory of learned helplessness in 1967. While Seligman demonstrated that learned helplessness did occur, we still don’t know why learned helplessness occurs (especially in humans).
Pavlov was much earlier (1897) and formed the theory of classical conditioning where a primary stimulus (food) was paired with a neutral stimulus (a bell) under the right conditions until the neutral stimulus would evoke a similar automatic response as the primary stimulus (e.g. drooling).
What you are describing also sounds a little like operant conditioning, where a learned behaviour is reinforced or punished with the application or removal of a stimulus. Or in this case, where the link between a behaviour and a stimulus is eroded to the point where the learned link goes extinct, and the subject becomes desensitized to the repeated stimulus.
This is not how I want to read an article.
I checked the comments before opening the article and wasn’t sure what to expect based on yours.
Holy hell, we really are catering to the lowest common denominator here. It’s not that I think we shouldn’t, we absolutely should, but our society really should be working harder to keep lowest from being so damn low.
And reader view doesn’t pick it up… gross
Might be the worst experience I’ve had. We don’t want books. We got rid of books
Over half of Americans read at below a 6th grade reading level. So it makes sense that they want to bring back picture books.
They’re called graphic novels…
Kidding
Humorously, maybe the writer wants to let it rot
It’s like a picture book!
I think it makes it harder for us to scrape their site and copy and paste it here.
GLOBAL GENERAL STRIKE, A BLOB CAN DREAM.
Great phrase, much more impact than quiet quit. I have plenty of sympathy for them, though that dipped substantially when one of the people they profiled became a “certified life coach” oh my god.
Quiet quit was always the establishment’s phrase anyway.
They made it up to spread a manufactured panic about people rationally refusing to do more than their contracts say for no more than their contract pay.
It’s interesting because people are people and it doesn’t matter where you are born.
If you look at it from a birds eye view you will see a younger, smart generation trying to fight it’s own governments.
It’s not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation. Currently each generation is fighting it’s own government and slowly realising how poor they have done in the last decades.
Nobody wants war.
Boomers want a war.
I actually think that the biggest damage the parents of the Boomers committed was glorifying their war stories. Don’t get me wrong, I probably would have too so I’m not saying this out of judgement. But I think the Boomers grew up feeling like the only way to prove themselves was to fight as hard as their parents did. And when there weren’t any Nazis to be found, they found fights with anybody they could.
… including their own children.
Idk, if I was young and rich I probably wouldn’t give a shit about changing anything. I’d maybe even invest in anything that promised to keep things the same
That’s EXACTLY what they do - invest I’m anything that promised to keep things the same, this is our salary.
t’s not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation
No, it’s owning class vs working class, anything else is a distraction in service of the owning class.
Workers of the world, unite! ✊
(edited in image. If you need image description - source)
Even marxists don’t simplify the classes as much as that diagram suggests. It’s missing peasants, artisans and the petty bourgeois. It’s also never been as simple as capitalist vs working class. Capitalists regularly fight amongst themselves as do the working class. This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it’s kinda silly.
I don’t think it’s honest to frame it in generational language either btw. Though that is a component of it.
This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it’s kinda silly.
There’s nothing wrong with a simplified model if it gets you the results you’re looking for. And for the vast majority of the working class thinking in simplistic terms such as capitalist vs. worker would improve their lives tremendously.
The more complex models might be useful for explaining how things change and evolve. But mainly complexity is introduced by capitalists (or capitalist simps) to sow discord among workers and keep us from organizing effectively.
Why are all the marxists coming out of the wood work? Y’all can’t run a society for shit. Why are you still here and existing?
China was one of your experiments that went wrong. Go and build a working model for a socialist or communist society and I might listen. Until then you have nothing to add. Anarchists had better luck than you guys and you killed them for it.
I mean, call me whatever you want. It’s irrelevant. Do you need my vote or not? If you don’t then ignore me. If you do then pay attention.
Which country do you live in? I live in the UK so unless you are here it’s mostly irrelevant what you vote for.
You asked the question bud. Not my fault you don’t like the answer.
There’s also the after translation term of laying flat
This is becoming a real perennial story, from what I gather the lay flat movement isn’t really very significant it’s probably less influential in China than incels are here, or a smaller niche that’s harder to think of - maybe like the nofap community or something. Big in some weird online spaces but pretty much unheard of out of it.
It’s an interesting one, kinda like Ken Keasy but without the acid.
My question is why do you keep connecting it to sex
Sigma grind set or virgin for life, no in between
Afaik those are usually the same thing lmao
They have an interesting strategy where they workout expenses for the year if they lived minimal. It might be 9k. So they work for a few months and save up that money then quit their job and “lay flat” for the rest of the year.
deleted by creator
Ahh yes. Lemmy’s favorite. Another “China bad” article. This is the same shit as “no one wants to work anymore”. Non news, ignore this shit.
This is not a “China bad” article. You might want to read it, for a change.
I don’t need to read shit from wall street journal
Actual article:
Fuck that’s so much better.
Funny, people in the USA have been doing that for 20+ years
Weirdly TikTok only shows me streets full with fentinels in USA. I don’t know if that’s propaganda or is it real bad out there
Propaganda. Every city has one or two neighborhoods (usually full of working class minorities) where police dump the homeless and addicts from everywhere else. Each of those areas has one or two particularly bad streets that look like shit and make for great fear mongering.
At the risk of sounding like propaganda myself… Just because you don’t witness poverty and crime doesn’t mean it is propaganda. US has a major homeless and drug epidemic that is getting worse. It is easy for those with money to put it out of sight and ignore it.
I’m visiting China for the first time right now for 2 weeks and I must say I’m very impressed with how clean the cities are and the lack of homeless and drug addicts.
In the US my old house in OKC has been broken into twice by homeless and my parent’s house in Miami twice as well, and their car stolen twice. Walking to work in Brooklyn, people are literally sleeping on the sidewalks under trash bags every night as everyone walks past like they aren’t there.
Even in my my home town in Vermont, population under 10,000, there are always homeless people out in the cold begging and sleeping in tents in the woods. These people have given up on life, or given bad luck, or addicted to drugs.
I haven’t seen any of that in China so far. Sure there are some areas outside the city centers that are more depressing looking, lack much personality, and have run down buildings but at least everyone has a home, a job, and is taken care of. People here seem to have more respect for themselves and for others. It is part of the culture here.
Everyone I talk to here says it is incredibly safe. In fact, today I saw my first 2 police cars on the highway for the first time a week into my trip. And we’ve been driving an average of 3 hours per day everywhere between Shenzhen and ChengDu (visiting factories ). There are many cameras everywhere but there isn’t a need for hundreds of police to patrol the streets non-stop like in every city in the US. I haven’t heard a single siren the entire trip either - in cities of 20 million. You won’t find that in NYC which has half the population. Just some thoughts I wanted to share, thanks for reading.
I really enjoyed this story format. It showed the strength of photographic journalism
EDIT: i present to you: the duality of humanity.
