“Involution” and “lying flat” are not only cultural manifestations of youth feeling but also discursively publicized ways of conveying the distribution of risk, opportunity, and mobility expectations, through welfare arrangements.
Across the world, the youth find themselves increasingly subject to burn out, precariously employed, and in a transitional phase towards stable adulthood even after years of invested educational time. Similar pressures have recently become evident in China with the popularization of two common vernacular words, involution (Neijuan, 内卷) and ‘lying flat’ (Tangping, 躺平). Frequently dismissed as ‘internet slang’ or as a generational mood, these terms can help us make sense of a generational experience marked by increased job market competition, limited mobility, and uncertainty in a fast-changing social world.
This article argues that ‘involution’ and ‘lying flat’ discourse serve as an informal diagnostic of how risk and opportunity are perceived to result from material conditions and welfare arrangements, as well as of perceptions of institutional structures and anticipated upward mobility and life-course stability. Young people’s accounts of their reality through these terms illustrate a tension between aspiration and withdrawal, a divergence between the priorities of developmental policy and their lived experience of insecurity, lack of recognition, and unpredictability of what course their lives may follow.
Taking a welfare-regime approach to these diagnostics can help us shift the discussion away from cultural essentialist views, placing youth discourse in dialogue with its corresponding institutional context.
Conceptual Development of Involution and Lying Flat
Initially an anthropological concept of self-reinforcing stagnation, involution has come to be an extremely popular cultural concept suggesting exhaustion generated by a growing rate of competition, lacking a commensurate reward in a context of increased demand for productivity and individual progress. It is usually used to explain heightened educational stress, credentialing, and labor market pressures, where one feels obliged to participate despite being unsure about its vertical progression and mobility prospects.
The salience of this term is documented in public discourse via social media platforms and web searches. The term surged in popularity in 2020, after a Tsinghua University student went viral for cycling across campus while simultaneously working on statistical modeling on his laptop. From that point on, the term expanded beyond academic competition to encompass multiple forms of career pressure and social anxiety. The Sina Weibo search volume documentation shows discussions surrounding 'neijuan' remain highly popular in the period between January and March 2023, hitting a peak of 2.64 million searches on January 9, 2023. Although these metrics are not representative indicators of the opinion of the population, they hint towards the popularity and spread of the idea in the digital public space.
In turn, the idea of 'lying flat' is a rhetorical device rather than a social phenomenon. Economic mobility among Chinese young people is lower than it was in previous generations, which reinforces inequalities and uncertainty. In response, young people in the workforce reduce their commitment to intensive working and diminish their consuming standards; they even delay marriage, parenthood, or property purchasing. Such a choice is not just a form of passive withdrawal, but a reassessment of the relationship between individual effort and expected returns in a context where competitive pressures persist while social protections remain limited. Under these conditions, 'lying flat' can be understood as a rational form of self-adjustment.
Social Impact in Education and Labor Markets
The growing educational needs and human resource needs in the job market have increased pressures on young workers, particularly among those whose options and livelihood relies on educational mobility. Students are exposed to one of the most competitive tests, the High School Examination (gaokao), which determines to a large extent the future options for students to pursue an academic path towards higher education. The rate of entry into general academic high schools is 45-50% nationwide. Those who fail are compelled to leave school or diverted into the secondary vocational education track, which provides skill-based and occupation-specific training designed for direct labor market entry rather than higher education progression. This examination-based system results in a large segment of Chinese students sent into vocational schooling, followed by career options mainly in the service industry. This early educational separation has rendered future job changes highly unequal, with limited economic mobility available to young professionals later in life.
These conditions in the labor market, together with the educational pressures, have continued to generate behaviors and attitudes expressed by the same concept of 'lying flat' amongst the youth. As the youth unemployment rate of China reached about 17% in 2025, joblessness and underemployment are a common benchmark among young adults through early career shifts. Moreover, the balance between effort and reward becomes an unlikely prospect, which reinforces the notion that hard work does not necessarily lead to better life conditions.
In this context, we can read the popularity of this term in public youth discourse as an adaptive reaction to limited opportunities for upward mobility, and not exclusively as expression of apathy. Given the volatility of career development options, with limited or rare opportunities for high rewards, young workers may feel they can counterbalance their reality by reaching for lower consumption goals, postponing life transitions of a larger scale, and even avoiding high-intensity, highly competitive work environments.
Institutional Mechanisms Shaping Youth Discontent
Such problems are not specific to the Chinese youth, and instead echo current global trends. Young people in most Western societies have a harder time moving up the housing ladder than their parents, and inflation and long-term wage stagnation have generated similar effects of burnout and increased competition. However, many of the pressures that cause discourses of involution and lying flat can be correlated to policy decisions in China. The mix between top-down policy and reduction of civil society spaces have negatively influenced market confidence. Policies implemented under the name of “Common Prosperity,” including the decision to scatter the after-school tutoring industry and the regulation of large tech companies, burdened the development. The zero-COVID regime in the period of the pandemic aggravated the situation. The combination of these macro-level shocks increases ambivalence regarding career prospects, making the withdrawal dynamic more prominent.
In particular, three institutional mechanisms can explain how China's welfare arrangements influence the youth's discontent and their adaptive discourses and positionings:
- Familiarized risk buffering
Families are at the heart of alleviating education, housing, and later-career risks. Studies of the intergenerational housing support prove the crucial impact of parental resources on young adults entering urban housing markets and pursuing more long-term financial plans, which further reinforces disparate abilities among the youth to absorb uncertainty. A familiarized welfare redistributes responsibility to personal support nets to control risk, but in so doing, creates a differentiated ability by socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Stratified access to opportunity
Mobility options are unequally distributed across regional, educational, and administrative vectors. Literature on the Hukou system has indicated consistent correlations between administrative status (rural vs. urban, local vs. non-local) and the accessibility of public goods and welfare services, which has contributed to unequal points of departure and horizons of opportunity for otherwise similar individuals. Inequality in access to resources influences how individuals assess the value of their effort. As a result, competition intensifies in tracks where upward mobility appears attainable, while engagement declines in pathways where opportunities are perceived to be limited.
- Housing and life-course security
Housing serves as a gateway between economic participation, forming a family, and a perceived transition to adulthood. Given the acute affordability limits in key Chinese megacities, often manifested in high prices relative to income and a structural imbalance in housing access, family planning may be indirectly affected. Whenever access to housing is closely linked to professional development and income, life-course stability and capacity to plan end up being conditional on professional success. In consequence, pressure and withdrawal discourses increase.
The combination of these mechanisms is important in the sense that involution and 'lying flat' discourses are not just forms of generational reactions to unfavorable job markets, but result from the welfare-mediated allocation of risk, opportunity, and life-course security.
Outlook
Examining the discourses of involution and lying flat underscores the role of social narratives in meaning-making around both personal choices and opportunities, and structural constraints and effects. These vernacular words do not represent mere generational ‘moods’, but rather the way the youth perceive their chances, the relationship between effort, reward, and life-course security, and how they diagnose changing welfare and work environments.
Considered this way, youth discourse refers to welfare-regime dynamics that determine anticipations of fairness, the plausibility of mobility routes, and limits of responsibility among people, households, and the state. These stories have a collective impact, as they allow seeing how modern inequalities are experienced and handled, both in terms of intensifying effort, partial retreat, or postponed entry to adulthood, under circumstances of uncertainty and structural transformation.
Header photo by Touann Gatouillat Vergos - Unsplash
