Losing your job at thirty-five, taking a half-pay cut and working twelve hours a day just to scrape together a way to survive — after years of desperate overtime, uncomplaining toil, and promotions that only piled on pressure, the reward is not commensurate returns but a cold-blooded casting-off of the millstone once the donkey’s work is done. This is not the collapse of individual ability; it is a true miniature of the structural predicament in which ordinary people today are mired. Zygmunt Bauman long ago pierced this cruel rule in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor: modern society has built a precise invisible system that enslaves workers’ bodies through the work ethic and domesticates ordinary people’s minds through consumerism — a two-pronged operation trapping countless wage earners in a closed loop of endless involution, self-squeezing of their own interests, and self-doubt, reducing them to the “new poor” of the age.
To fully understand the disciplinary essence of the modern work ethic, we must trace labor and work back to their origins: work was never an innate human instinct, but a tool of rule designed step by step by the upper classes to control the bottom and extract surplus value. Ancient times had no spiritual sales pitch about “striving and growing,” but they had more blunt and cruel means of locking down the labor freedom of the poor — and this ancient logic of control is precisely the primitive prototype of today’s workplace interest-squeezing and psychological PUA.
Labor in primitive human society was a spontaneous, free, self-sufficient act of survival: hunting, gathering, and planting to feed oneself and one’s kin, with no hierarchical oppression, no forced labor, no obligation of unpaid devotion. Labor then was a survival instinct, not a moral shackle, much less the sole chip for earning the qualification to live.
As Harari argues in Sapiens with his subversive thesis: the progress of human civilization has never been progress in happiness; instead it has step by step locked humanity into a prison of toil and anxiety. Humanity’s original foraging era was the golden age in which ordinary people were freest and most at ease.
Foragers in primitive society completely escaped all the labor disciplines of later ages. Archaeological and anthropological research confirms: ancient Homo sapiens needed only 3-4 hours of labor a day to meet the whole day’s food needs, with effective weekly labor of just 15-20 hours. The remaining hours were spent daydreaming, socializing, playing, resting, and exploring nature — no endless task pressure, no performance-review involution, no mortgage bills, no age anxiety.
Their quality of life far exceeded that of later farmers and wage workers: a diverse, rich, nutritionally balanced diet with no need to fill the belly on a single grain; complete personal freedom, not bound to the land, not dependent on the powerful, not forced to labor; egalitarian communities without classes, without interest-squeezing, slavery, or personal humiliation — everyone self-sufficient, everyone equal and free.
Harari says bluntly that the Agricultural Revolution was the biggest fraud in human history. Humans imagined they had domesticated wheat and taken control of food; in reality, wheat domesticated humans. For stable harvests, humans completely gave up a life of free movement and free labor, nailed fast to the land: day after day bending to plant, weed, irrigate, and guard the fields, toiling all year round and all life long, spinal strain and bodily pain becoming the norm.
More fatally, the Agricultural Revolution gave birth for the first time to private property, class division, and the squeezing of surplus interests: once grain had a surplus, the powerful began monopolizing resources and ordinary people’s labor was plundered without compensation; to guard harvests and fight over land, war, oppression, and hierarchy arose. From then on, labor was no longer the joyful instinct of free self-sustenance but became thoroughly the survival shackle of the lower classes and the tool by which the upper classes controlled them.
After class society emerged, the nature of labor was completely rewritten: toil became the exclusive original sin and duty of the lower classes. In ancient Greece and Rome, society formed an absolute class consensus: free men, nobles, and sages needed no labor; labor was the exclusive affair of slaves and lowborn commoners; diligent work was not a virtue but the innate fate of the lower orders. Nobles monopolized power, resources, and leisure, while the bottom could only toil for life, supplying the upper classes’ pleasures without pay — labor degenerated utterly from an act of self-sustenance into an instrument of class enslavement.
By the medieval feudal era, the entire system of lower-class control had fully taken shape. Ancient governing classes forced the poor into lifelong, inescapable toil through three means — physical shackles + institutional lock-in + moral domestication — completely homologous with the “kill two birds with one stone” logic of the modern work ethic, only more naked in form:
First, binding person to land, cutting off every fallback for making a living. Under feudalism, peasants were tied fast by household registration and land to the lord’s fief — forbidden to move freely, choose their own trade, or leave their posts at will. After the Black Death made European labor scarce, bottom-tier workers could have used the moment to raise wages and win freedom; the governing classes immediately issued harsh decrees capping wages, forbidding workers from changing jobs, and forcing them back to their home villages to labor — using violent institutions to eliminate any bargaining power from below. Peasants owned no land, surrendered most of their output to the lord, and kept only barely enough to get by — laboring unpaid for the upper class all their lives, utterly stripped of the possibility of independent existence.
Second, violent punishment as control — no work, no escape from penalty. Ancient times had no “unemployment tolerance”; feudal and colonial systems alike followed a plain and cruel rule: poor people who didn’t work or submit to control were branded vagrants and obstinate subjects, facing arrest, punishment, and exile. Plantation slavery was the extreme of violent control, forcing the bottom tier to labor with chains and corporal punishment, bluntly practicing the survival law of “work or die” — precisely the ancient source of the modern workplace’s implicit survival rules.
Third, religious moral domestication, packaging toil as fate and atonement. To lower the cost of control and dissolve resistance from below, governing classes joined with the church to construct an early labor morality: declaring that the poverty and toil of the lower classes were heaven’s will and atonement; that keeping one’s place, working diligently, and obeying meekly made one a good subject, while laziness, slackness, and wanting to break free were sins. Getting the bottom tier to accept from within the fate of “born to toil, born to be lowly” — meekly submitting to interest-squeezing without violent repression — enabled long-lasting control.
The early-modern enclosure movement completed the crucial transition from “ancient violent slavery” to the “modern work ethic.” The “sheep eating men” enclosures violently stripped peasants of their land and seized communal survival resources, turning peasants who could once feed themselves into proletarians with no land, no trade, and no way back. Having lost their land and self-sufficiency, they could only flood into factories and sell their labor for meager wages. At this point, the physical shackles were dismantled and mental discipline formally took the stage: capital no longer needed chains to bind people — it only needed to strip away every fallback for survival, and ordinary people would voluntarily involute and squeeze their own interests.
From this moment, humanity’s fate completely reversed: the more civilization iterated and the more institutions improved, the less freedom, the harder the toil, and the heavier the anxiety for ordinary people. Primitive foragers needed no involution to survive, no work to define their personhood, no interest-squeezing or humiliation to endure; whereas modern people of the agricultural, industrial, and consumer ages have been fitted step by step with land shackles, workplace discipline, and consumption anxiety, reduced to tool-people working for the system all their lives.
Many people spend half a lifetime before suddenly waking up: the workplace truism “grow through your work” was never the company’s fulfillment of the employee — it is a disciplinary sales pitch meticulously designed by capital, a gentle and thorough over-extraction of the self.
I. The Work Ethic: The Mental Shackles Inherited from the Industrial Age
The feudal age pinned the bottom tier to toil with the triple chains of land, violence, and religion; modern society uses three new chains — economy, workplace, and public opinion. The form has softened; the core has never changed.
Corresponding to feudalism’s “binding of person to land,” the modern era has “economic binding.” In the past, household registration and fiefs restricted movement; today, salaries, mortgages, debt, and job supply cut off the exits. Formal positions keep shrinking; outsourcing, dispatch labor, and flexible employment become the mainstream; companies monopolize job supply, job seekers have no bargaining power, and refusing harsh performance quotas or extreme working hours means losing your income source. Mortgages, car loans, consumer debt, and childcare and education costs form long-term rigid expenditures: people must keep working to repay debt, and once unemployed they default and their credit records are damaged — the modern version of being nailed to the land. And modern people are even more fragile than ancient peasants: they own no means of production; food, clothing, shelter, and transport all depend on wages — they don’t even have a small plot of land for self-sufficiency.
Corresponding to feudalism’s “violent punishment and control,” the modern era has “economic penalties and workplace elimination.” There is no longer any need to arrest vagrants or flog and exile them; performance deductions, last-place elimination, and instant dismissal of outsourced staff accomplish the implicit coercion. Unreasonably high targets are set; miss them and wages are docked, ratings cut, bonuses canceled — while excess gains are capped, with all the risk borne by the worker. Once eliminated, with labor supply in surplus, it takes a long time to find equally paid work, and the income gap hits life directly. The labels of long-term unemployment and low income, credit stains, and interrupted social insurance further compress living space — forming a social punishment more covert than corporal punishment.
Corresponding to feudalism’s “religious moral domestication,” the modern era has “the accompanying psychological PUA of the work ethic, meritocracy, and consumerism.” In the past the church said toil was atonement and poverty was heaven’s will; today the whole society says effort brings rewards and poverty means you didn’t hustle hard enough — attributing low wages, over-extraction, and unemployment entirely to personal failings. Striver-ism and anti-“lying flat” opinion packaging long overtime and sacrificing life as virtue; consumerism constantly manufactures upgrade demands for houses, cars, education, and luxuries, making people toil endlessly just to keep up appearances. Life’s value is reduced to a single metric — income, position, performance — while rest, low desire, and valuing family are seen as lacking ambition. The education system instills score rankings and academic involution from childhood, pre-training the mindset of survival of the fittest, so that as adults people naturally accept KPIs, elimination systems, and unpaid overtime.
The underlying logic of the two is completely identical: the top controls the resources of survival and, through a system mixing hard and soft means, keeps the bottom tier laboring continuously while dissolving the will to resist from the mind. Feudalism relied on visible violence; the modern age relies on invisible economic and mental shackles — looking more civilized, but with no weaker binding force.
The work ethic born of the industrial age carried a clear utilitarian purpose from the start — truly a “kill two birds with one stone” tool of capitalist rule. Industrialization was then expanding at breakneck speed, urgently needing endless cheap labor, while society urgently needed to control the vulnerable groups who couldn’t fit the system or support themselves. To that end, upper society constructed a universal morality: labor is virtue, diligence is duty, dependence on an employer and unconditional devotion are the only legitimate life, while laziness, slackness, and seeking work-life balance are all faults.
This ethic fit the ruling class’s core demands perfectly: they didn’t need workers with thoughts, dignity, and autonomous choice — only docile, diligent tool-people who could do nothing but labor and sacrifice themselves forever. It replicated the underlying logic of plantation slavery, merely swapping physical shackles for mental ones. It forcibly domesticated ordinary people, making them voluntarily give up their own demands and overdraw their time and energy without pay, feeding labor endlessly into industrial development; at the same time it set a cold survival rule — work or die — completely locking off the bottom tier’s exits.
The workplace rules we once firmly believed are all concrete embodiments of this discipline. Companies loudly promote hustle culture and growth values, enforce 996 schedules, deny the boundary between work and life, and label employees unwilling to work overtime without limits or bear excess pressure as “unambitious, not a values fit.” Promotion has never been a commensurate reward — only a one-way piling on of responsibility and pressure, with negligible salary increases and doubling workloads. “Work more, earn more” has never been the workplace truth; “work more, bear more pressure, be consumed more” is the unchanging reality.
This absurdity was completely exposed by one line in P Storm (2019). In the film, the lowly inmate Ah Luk delivers a heart-stabbing complaint:
“Out there, working and renting and eating costs ten thousand a month. In prison you spend nothing — that’s like earning ten thousand. Going to prison is the only way out for young people in Hong Kong.”
At first hearing it sounds like a joke; on reflection it sends a chill down the spine. It went viral because it tears open the most absurd face of capital’s interest-squeezing loop: outside — 996 involution, pay cuts and layoffs, extreme working hours, crushing rent, unemployment panic; working yourself to the bone just to get by, with no security whatsoever. Whereas prison, which takes away freedom, provides room and board — no rent, no involution, no unemployment anxiety, no PUA. When “working is a worse deal than prison” becomes a kind of dark truth, it proves precisely that society’s labor system has become thoroughly deformed — ordinary people work diligently and squeeze themselves dry, yet cannot live in warmth and decency; while a prison that takes away freedom can provide the “stable survival guarantee” that ordinary people cannot get even by struggling outside.
It’s not that prison is attractive — it’s that contemporary wage workers’ living environment has become more bitter than prison.
More cruelly, in order to keep pressing down labor costs and stabilizing the interest-squeezing system, capital actively maintains normalized unemployment, deliberately creating a “reserve army of the unemployed.” This is an extremely utilitarian form of psychological manipulation: making the plight of the totally unemployed and destitute the reference point for those still employed. Watching the unemployed — income-less, unprotected, marginalized by society — wage workers earning meager salaries, enduring extreme hours, and constantly liable to be eliminated will lower their own bottom line, mute their resentment, and console themselves with “at least I have a job.”
Without any pressure from companies, workers will spontaneously endure over-extraction, join the involution, and give up defending their rights. The employed fear unemployment; the unemployed are forced to compromise; the bottom tier is thoroughly divided and set to wear itself down, with no one questioning distributive injustice or systemic loopholes — and capital’s interest-squeezing order takes firm root. Just as, on the eve of Xiaohongshu’s IPO, core employees about to vest their options were dismissed in batches: countless employees who had exceeded targets year after year and been promoted and grown annually were kicked aside at the very moment their value was about to pay off, years of devotion wiped out with a single stroke. Such millstone-casting-off is not the misconduct of a few unscrupulous companies; it is the inevitable norm of profit-seeking capital.
In today’s labor market, this trend has intensified. Many companies are no longer even willing to hire for formal positions; they would rather chop core business into short-term projects and temporary demands than establish stable employment relationships with workers. Outsourcing, dispatch, and flexible employment have flooded across the board — nominally “organizational agility” and “cost reduction and efficiency gains,” but in essence shifting management costs, growth responsibility, and the compensation risks brought by labor law entirely onto workers. Without a formal labor contract, the company needn’t take responsibility for the employee’s development, needn’t pay full social insurance, and needn’t pay severance when cutting staff. One short-term contract, one service agreement, and the obligations that should belong to the employer side are sliced away cleanly.
When job supply far exceeds the number of seekers, bargaining power tilts entirely to companies. Wage workers aren’t choosing jobs; they are being forced to accept a set of survival rules drawn up unilaterally. More absurd still, some companies design performance reviews as naked punishment games: a completion rate of 110% to 140% brings neither reward nor penalty; below 110% means an 8% fine; only above 140% earns an 8% bonus. This is not incentive — it is a fine trap meticulously designed with mathematics: the vast majority, striving with all their might, can only land in the “neither reward nor penalty” or even “penalty” range; the harder they chase the target, the more easily they are trapped by the harsh ruler, involuting themselves to the limit while still bearing responsibility for failing to reach “140% excess.” Here labor law is hollowed out, dignity is converted into performance points, and workers are stripped of even the most basic qualification to bargain.
Spread out for inspection, this rule is not merely cold — it blatantly tramples the edge of labor law. Employers themselves have no right to fine employees; wage deductions are limited to a few statutory situations such as actual losses caused by the worker, withholding of social insurance and income tax, or court judgments. Docking 8% of salary directly for “missing performance targets,” unsupported by any actual loss, constitutes illegal deduction. And setting 110% as the passing line is itself a carefully designed threshold: it swaps the “normal work standard” for an “excess-output standard,” judging most people “unqualified” within the range of normal effort; capping the reward above 140% means that even if employees push to the limit, most of the excess gains still fall into the company’s pocket while the risk is borne entirely by the individual. A person earning eight thousand a month docked six hundred and forty just for not hitting 110% — that money has no legal basis whatsoever and could in theory be recovered through arbitration, but in reality the cost and price of recovery often deter workers from trying.
The root reason companies dare to put these rules on the table is the severe imbalance of the labor market. Graduates increase year by year, job seekers over thirty-five are systematically excluded, industry contraction releases a huge unemployed population — positions scarce, seekers in surplus, choice tilting entirely to capital. A formal position means social insurance, severance, training, seniority, and other long-term fixed costs; outsourcing, dispatch, and flexible employment let companies “use and discard,” shedding labor-law responsibility while paying nothing for employees’ growth. When “accept it or leave” becomes the norm, many people can only sign, knowing full well the contract terms are unreasonable and the performance rules illegal — not because they don’t know the law, but because they must survive first.
Many people mistakenly believe outsourcing and dispatch are only the chaos of small and medium private firms; that has long ceased to be the case. Stable state-owned enterprises, large listed companies, and public-sector units are equally using outsourcing and labor dispatch on a massive scale. Bank tellers, telecom carrier customer service, government service-window posts, front-line operating posts in large SOEs, content-review and ground-promotion teams at internet giants… positions once held by formal staff are now largely filled by outsourced workers. Headcount doesn’t balloon, labor costs stay controllable, layoffs carry no severance, social insurance is paid at the minimum base or not at all, and when problems arise responsibility can be pushed onto the outsourcing company. Sinking employment risk while hoisting benefits upward has become the common choice of all kinds of enterprises; the only difference is whether it’s packaged more properly or more nakedly.
The deeper problem is that this model shifts business risk entirely onto workers: when the economy is good, companies take the lion’s share of excess profits; when conditions are bad, employees bear the losses from missed targets. Workers are forced to choose between “defending rights by law” and “keeping the rice bowl,” and most of the time rent, loans, and family expenses leave no room to hesitate. This is not personal cowardice; it is structural powerlessness.
More covert than the system itself is the ideology that defends it — meritocracy. The word was coined in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, originally intended as critique and warning, not praise. He warned: a society that allocates resources entirely by ability and achievement will ultimately create cruel class division. But today it has been conscripted by companies as their most-used psychological pitch: ability plus effort equals reward; more work, more pay; the capable rise and the mediocre fall; let real ability do the talking. It sounds fair, but in truth it transfers all structural injustice onto personal responsibility.
Meritocracy’s first deception is pretending that opportunity is equal. It deliberately ignores the enormous influence on outcomes of labor surplus, job outsourcing, family background, industry dividends, and luck. When a company drags the performance passing line up to 110% and docks and eliminates those who fall short, meritocracy’s explanation is: you didn’t work hard enough, your ability is lacking. Institutional injustice is deftly converted into personal failure.
The second deception is reducing people to performance numbers. KPIs, completion rates, rankings — looking only at short-term data, not at long-term accumulation, teamwork, or objective conditions. What this screening truly selects is not the most creative people, but those most able to endure over-extraction and most willing to consume themselves. Companies use this standard to rationalize docking, elimination, and outsourcing: those who can’t withstand harsh performance are “poor performers,” unworthy of formal status and protection.
The third deception is forging a two-way mental shackle. Winners credit all their wealth and stable positions to personal striving, ignoring platform dividends and the opportunities of the age, refusing to backstop those at the bottom; losers, when unemployed, docked, or returned by outsourcing companies, fall into self-doubt, assuming they weren’t excellent enough, not daring to question the system. This is precisely the root of involution: everyone is forced to compete without end — resting equals laziness, lying flat equals failure.
Meritocracy shares origins with Social Darwinism but is more covert than the latter. Social Darwinism bluntly preaches the law of the jungle — the weak deserve to be eliminated; meritocracy packages this jungle law as “fair competition, distribution by labor.” It doesn’t say directly “you’re weak, you deserve it,” but “the rules are absolutely fair — if you lose out it must be because you didn’t try hard enough.” Pushed to the extreme, meritocracy slides completely into jungle-style Social Darwinism. Companies’ mass outsourcing and punitive performance systems are the typical product of the two combined.
Back to present reality: eliminate formal positions, use outsourcing en masse, and companies will say “we only keep excellent talent who can bear high performance”; with a 110% passing line and capped fines, companies will say “the assessment standards are public — it’s your performance that fell short.” Labor oversupply leaves workers no choice but to passively accept harsh rules, and to resist is to be replaced — this is meritocracy’s greatest lie: the competition was never free to begin with.
The consequences of meritocracy are systemic. Quality resources and stable positions keep flowing to those who can involute without limit, making it ever harder for ordinary people to rise; human value is thoroughly alienated into monthly performance numbers; public protections keep weakening as society accepts by default that “people who aren’t excellent enough don’t deserve a backstop”; anxiety, depression, and occupational burnout become the norm — people must forever prove they are excellent enough, with no room to breathe.
To escape this trap, first distinguish “effort is useful” from “performance-ism.” Effort itself is nothing to be ashamed of, but life’s value cannot be bound entirely to performance, salary, and establishment status; the enormous influence of environment, industry, and supply-demand on personal fate must be objectively acknowledged. Second, distinguish personal problems from institutional ones: performance fines, illegal outsourcing, and unreasonable assessments are the company’s institutional violations, not personal inadequacy. Third, refuse unlimited self-squeezing; learn to draw work boundaries and reject punitive, over-extracting rules. Reasonable performance standards can raise efficiency, but punitive deductions, backstop-free outsourcing, and reality-detached assessment targets are essentially companies using the name of merit to shift costs and over-extract from workers.
In this market jointly defined by meritocracy and Social Darwinism, many people don’t lack the will to resist — they have no choice. Clarity doesn’t mean instantly changing the rules; it means at least no longer turning the blade on yourself.
But clarity still has value. Before joining a company, try to secure a directly signed formal contract and refuse outsourcing or dispatch for core-business positions; in interviews, ask clearly about performance calculation, deduction rules, and which entity pays social insurance, and keep records of communications. If you’ve already suffered illegal deductions, preserve performance notices, pay slips, deduction records, and attendance logs; first demand return in writing, and if that fails, complain to the labor inspection brigade or apply for arbitration. In the long run, standardizable, replaceable positions are the easiest to outsource; only mastering core technology and business resources raises your bargaining power and keeps you from being casually converted into a cost line.
Of course, saying all this is not meant to reproach those forced to compromise. In a market of oversupply, having to sign even knowing the terms are unconscionable clauses proves exactly how deeply this system squeezes people. Staying alive is itself already a form of resistance.
II. Consumerism: The More Covert Psychological PUA
More covert and more wounding than workplace over-extraction is the accompanying psychological PUA system born alongside it, which has thoroughly completed the debasement of ordinary people’s personhood and the incitement to self-blame.
A widely circulated jest — “how is it that wherever you go, the economy is bad? Are you the one ruining the economy?” — has long escaped its original comic context to become a weapon for the top to discipline the bottom. It crudely erases all structural problems — industry contraction, age discrimination, job scarcity, distribution imbalance — and blames everyone’s hardship and frustration entirely on personal inadequacy. It makes the unemployed doubt themselves, makes the involuted berate themselves, and makes ordinary people afraid to complain about the environment or question the rules, able only to consume themselves inwardly without end.
Meanwhile, the flood of internet labels like “poor loser” (qiong diaosi) completes the final layer of mental confinement. This pitch nakedly equates economic status with personal worth: ordinary income, no capacity for high consumption, no glamorous resume — and you are defined as a failure, inferior, unworthy of dignity. Poverty is no longer an objective living condition but is sculpted into personal original sin.
Bauman points out that modern society has long since transitioned from a “society of producers” to a “society of consumers,” and the definition of the poor has been completely rewritten along with it. The poor of the industrial age were those who couldn’t participate in labor, who had lost work; the new poor of the consumer age are flawed, unqualified consumers. Many people toil year after year without ever slacking, yet because their consumption capacity is limited and they can’t keep up with worldly standards of gloss, they are labeled failures and sink into deep self-denial.
Consumerism’s control over ordinary people goes far beyond a few taunts and labels — it is a meticulously designed system of debt and desire. Capital’s greatest skill is packaging “want” as “need,” packaging luxuries as necessities, packaging overdraft consumption as “being good to yourself.” The house turns from a shelter against wind and rain into a “necessary milestone in life” and a “class pass,” one home locking down thirty years of labor; the car turns from a means of transport into a status symbol and social threshold, car loans making ordinary people shoulder monthly payments before they’ve earned any freedom; phones replaced yearly, bags that must be designer, weddings that must have diamond rings, festivals that must have gifts — these “standard-issue lives” meticulously manufactured by capital make people with limited incomes constantly overdraw the future just to maintain a decent appearance.
Even more ruthless is the flood of consumer loans, installments, and credit card bills. They turn “can’t afford” into “can pay,” slicing one-time large expenditures into seemingly light monthly payments, letting ordinary people slide unknowingly into the abyss of debt. Young people owe Huabei, Baitiao, and online loans as soon as they start working; middle-aged people carry mortgages, car loans, and education loans; even the elderly are harvested by health supplements and retirement schemes. Debt is like an invisible chain binding ordinary people fast to their workstations: not daring to resign, not daring to get sick, not daring to rest, not daring to resist — because each month’s repayment date arrives punctually, allowing not a moment’s breath.
The genius of this mechanism is that it makes the squeezed group actively cooperate in its own squeezing. The work ethic forces you to earn desperately; consumerism forces you to spend desperately — one collecting, one releasing, thoroughly wringing out ordinary people’s time and wealth. The overtime pay you earn from overtime turns straight into the mortgage payment; the savings you scrimped and saved are easily harvested by a single “refined living” marketing campaign; you think you’re pursuing happiness, but in fact capital is defining happiness for you, planning your spending for you, locking down your whole life for you.
Consumerism’s Mind-Shaping Pitch: From Man-Made Festivals to Debt Traps
To empty ordinary people’s wallets, capital relies on a mature system of sales pitch. Day after day these pitches seep into life through ads, livestreams, short videos, and social feeds, packaging consumption as a necessity for happiness, love, growth, and self-care.
Man-made shopping festivals conjure consumption rituals out of thin air. “Double 11 Shopping Carnival — you wait all year for this one time,” “miss it and wait another whole year,” “everything half price — buying is earning”; 618’s “mid-year mega sale, the only low prices of the first half, empty your cart to reward yourself for half a year of hard work”; Double 12’s “year-end clearance — don’t buy now and it’s the year’s most expensive”; plus the 3.8 Goddess Festival, 520, Qixi, Valentine’s Day, 818, the 99 Bargain Festival, the New Year Goods Festival… ordinary dates are packaged into exclusive consumption rituals, manufacturing scarcity anxiety of “missing out means huge loss” and treating the buying spree as an essential festival procedure.
“Spending = treating yourself well” is the most mainstream PUA. “Women must be good to themselves,” “you deserve better,” “after a year of hard work, you owe yourself a reward,” “the apartment is rented, but life isn’t,” “unhappy? Just shop — retail therapy cures all exhaustion,” “working is tiring enough; why wrong yourself?” These pitches forcibly bind consumption to self-care: not spending equals mistreating yourself and living cheaply — perfectly completing the closed loop of the work ethic: toil involuted at work, then spend away your savings, harvested at both ends.
“Only those who spend well can earn well” distorts attribution and dissolves the instinct to save. “Money isn’t saved, it’s earned,” “without spending, where’s the motivation to earn?” “Saving only makes you poorer the more you save; spending boldly raises your vision,” “earning is just the process — what you buy is the fruit of your labor.” True “spending to invest in yourself” should be skills and learning, but merchants swap it for meaningless commodity consumption, inducing wage workers to overdraw salaries and consume on credit.
Emotional blackmail quantifies love and happiness into commodities. “If you love her, buy it for her — someone unwilling to spend on you definitely doesn’t love you,” “no gift on the festival means you don’t matter,” “ritual sense can’t be skipped — romance without consumption is empty talk,” “men are responsible for earning to support the family, women for looking beautiful.” Friendship, romance, family affection, self-pleasure — all must be proven through consumption, and human feeling is alienated into commodity one-upmanship.
Scarcity anxiety and loss fear, bombarded at high frequency in livestream rooms. “Flash sale, one day only, no restock,” “limited edition, exclusive collaboration, low stock,” “don’t buy now, regret all year when the price rises,” “buy it and feel a moment’s pinch; don’t buy it and regret a lifetime,” “rounded off it’s basically free — grab it for the price of a milk tea.” They package non-necessities as bargain opportunities and small expenditures as imperceptible spending, emptying wallets in the heat of impulse.
Identity and taste discrimination complete the loop of psychological humiliation. “You get what you pay for; cheap means shoddy,” “after thirty you buy only quality, never price,” “refined people never settle; cheap items drag down your aura,” “everyone has it — you can’t fall behind.” Not having money to consume is equated with bad taste and cheap personhood, echoing the “poor loser” label and forcing ordinary people to overdraft consumption to keep up appearances.
Small-amount advance consumption packages borrowing as light and imperceptible. “Zero down payment, use now pay later, just a few yuan a month — no pressure,” “interest-free installments, easily grab the item of your dreams,” “possessing it now matters most — no need to wait until you’ve saved up,” “life is only a few decades; enjoying it in time matters most.” These slogans numb young people to debt and turn advance consumption into a lifestyle.
These pitches and Bauman’s theory form a seamlessly closed loop: the work ethic manufactures exhaustion and lack; consumerism precisely fills the emotional gap, telling you only spending can dissolve pain and prove worth; man-made shopping festivals periodically empty labor income; when income can’t keep up, you are PUA’d into self-blame with “the bad economy is your own inadequacy”; the unemployed and low-consuming are labeled “poor losers,” further breeding anxiety — involuting desperately to earn, only to consume. Capital first takes your time through workplace over-extraction, then empties your income through consumption pitch, leaving ordinary people trapped for life in the cycle of “work — consume — anxiety,” becoming the true “new poor” of Bauman’s account.
“Life Needs Ritual Sense”: The Classic Trap of Swapping Heartfelt Care for Consumption
Of all consumerist pitches, “life needs ritual sense” is the most deceptive strand. It isn’t naked like “buying is earning”; draped in the cloak of warmth, romance, and self-care, it remakes ordinary days, intimate relationships, and self-pleasure entirely into consumption scenarios.
Merchants’ core slogans are everywhere: “Life needs ritual sense, so ordinary days can shine,” “no daily life, however ordinary, can lack ritual sense,” “ritual sense is ordinary people’s only antidote to life’s numbness,” “a life without ritual sense is merely existing.” These lines first elevate ritual sense into a life necessity, then quietly transfer the right to define “ritual sense” into the hands of commodities.
Then the variants pile on. For self-reward: “the harder you work, the more ritual sense you owe yourself,” “breakfast needs plating, coffee needs aromatherapy — even alone time must max out ritual sense,” “the rental is small, but ritual sense can’t be skipped.” For romantic blackmail: “someone who loves you will never skip festival ritual sense,” “the essence of romance is being willing to create ritual sense for the other,” “no gift or candlelight on Valentine’s Day or the anniversary means perfunctory love.” For festival consumption: “the meaning of a festival is spending money to create exclusive ritual sense,” “stock up on ambiance goods in the mega sale, bring ritual sense into daily life.” For taste humiliation: “refined people never lack daily ritual sense,” “reluctance to spend on ritual sense is surrendering to life,” “cheap making-do will ruin the ritual sense life deserves.” For installment consumption: “a few hundred yuan of ritual sense, painlessly via installments,” “possess the ambiance first, earn the money slowly — don’t settle in life.”
This pitch’s PUA logic has three layers.
Layer one: swapping concepts, replacing “heartfelt care” with “spending money.” True ritual sense could be low-cost, heartfelt little things: chatting before bed, a home-cooked meal, wildflowers from the roadside, remembering the other’s preferences — the core is investing time and sincerity. But merchants completely reconstruct the definition: ritual sense = commodities, premium-priced consumer goods, check-in-style consumption. Ordinary roses boxed up carry a premium of more than ten times; an ordinary cake with decorative candles doubles in price; aromatherapy, Instagrammable tableware, balloon decorations are all packaged as “ritual-sense necessities.” The subtext is perfectly clear: not spending = no ritual sense = you don’t understand life, don’t understand love.
Layer two: catching the baton from workplace over-extraction to complete the closed-loop harvest. The work ethic first wrings out people’s time and energy with 996, involution, and “work more to grow more,” leaving them chronically exhausted and depressed; at this point the “ritual sense” pitch precisely fills the emotional gap: working is bitter enough — only consumption can manufacture ritual sense to heal yourself. So the meager salary earned through bitter involution is poured entirely into ambiance consumption; even with limited income, people overdraft and pay in installments to keep up appearances, finally becoming Bauman’s new poor: holding steady jobs yet never able to save, forever harvested at both ends by work and consumption.
Layer three: ranking personhood high and low, manufacturing the shame of the “unqualified consumer.” In the consumer society’s standards of judgment, people are no longer defined by diligence but ranked by consumption capacity and investment in ambiance. Willing to spend on ritual sense = refined, decent, loving life; reluctant to consume, pursuing simplicity and practicality = coarse, perfunctory, unworthy of a good life. This logic shares roots with the “poor loser” label: unable to participate in the standardized consumption game, you are defined as personally defective — doubting and debasing yourself, voluntarily doubling down on involution to earn, just to keep up with the so-called “ritual-sense standard.”
What needs clarity is that ritual sense itself is not wrong; what’s wrong is capital monopolizing ritual sense as a commodity. Native ritual sense rests on emotion and time: regular conversation, simple home cooking, remembering the other’s preferences, walks and heart-to-hearts, quiet solitary reading — unrelated to money, yet bringing real warmth. The pseudo-ritual sense sold by capital is Instagrammable check-in sets, limited-edition gift boxes, premium-priced flowers, one-off decorations for photo posting — its core is commodity transaction; strip away the consumption and no real emotional value remains, only debt and emptiness.
Livestream Shopping: A Real-Time Immersive System of Psychological Manipulation
If ads and e-commerce are static inducement, livestream shopping is a real-time, high-intensity, immersive psychological operation. It concentrates pitches like “be good to yourself,” “life needs ritual sense,” and “man-made mega sales” into one livestream room, using multiple psychological techniques to utterly crush ordinary people’s rationality.
Step one: close the distance, build emotional trust. Hosts use “family,” “sisters,” “babes” to blur the buyer-seller relationship, packaging themselves as wage workers, moms, or factory bosses just like you, crafting the empathetic image of “insiders don’t earn dirty money.” The pitch plugs directly into workplace exhaustion: “working 12 hours a day, exhausted from overtime — what’s the point of begrudging yourself?” “Working is grievance enough; this little money for happiness is worth it.” Your body and mind, over-extracted by the work ethic, immediately find an outlet of “treating yourself well” here, and consumption is packaged as the emotional antidote.
Step two: fake price games, manufacturing the illusion of a steal. First falsely inflate the counter’s original price, then “haggle” on the spot — even staging scripts of arguing with the manufacturer or calling to force the boss to concede a discount, creating a false impression of selling at a loss. “Counter price 899, livestream room just 299, today’s exclusive price break” — in reality the so-called original price is mostly fabricated, and the low price is merely the normal selling price. Add “only this livestream has this price,” “livestream-exclusive gifts,” “buying two sets is a better deal,” manufacturing a sense of exclusive privilege and an impulse to over-consume.
Step three: hunger marketing + countdown pressure, using loss fear to suppress rationality. This is the livestream room’s strongest harvesting technique. High-frequency repetition of “only the last 5 orders left,” “stock nearly gone,” “coming off the shelf any second” — while the backend can refresh stock infinitely; “5, 4, 3, 2, 1, link is up” with countdown sound effects and red pop-up text compresses thinking time; real-time announcements of “3,000 orders already snapped up,” “hundreds paying simultaneously,” accompanied by paid commenters flooding “got it, such a deal.” People’s fear of losing a discount far exceeds their desire to gain a benefit; under high-pressure urgency they skip the “do I actually need this?” judgment and click to order subconsciously.
Step four: all-round scenario seeding, binding ritual sense and refined living. Aromatherapy, plated tableware, and decorative lights are defined as “even a rental needs ambiance”; beauty and fashion are packaged as “refined-girl essentials, your workplace outfit face”; personal-care small appliances are pitched as “after a hard day you must treat yourself with good things.” Goods you never needed to buy are defined as standard equipment of decency, happiness, and self-love — not buying equals living cheaply.
Step five: installments and zero down payments weaken the pain of spending. “Interest-free installments, a few yuan a day, grab it for the price of a milk tea,” “no need to save — use now, pay later, enjoy first.” Deliberately splitting the total price and diluting the pressure of large expenditures induces advance consumption. Many wage workers earn meager monthly salaries yet, under the pitch’s inducement, overdraw credit, repay debt month after month, and fall into the closed loop of “work to repay, repay to work.”
Step six: immediacy + no-replay design, cutting off room to cool down. Most livestream rooms disable replays; the deal is valid only in the moment — you have no time to compare prices or weigh needs. Traditional e-commerce allows days of hesitation; livestreams pursue instant transactions, giving rationality no buffer.
The livestream consumption system links perfectly with workplace discipline: the work ethic exhausts your time and energy, bringing depression and fatigue; the livestream room precisely fills the emotional gap with “treat yourself, ritual sense, low-price perks”; multiple tricks force over-consumption and advance borrowing; after consumption, debt zeroes your balance, leaving you only to involute even harder to earn and repay; when unemployed or unable to consume highly, you are labeled “incompetent, poor loser,” blaming yourself — and the cycle continues. Capital wrings out workers’ time through the workplace on one side and empties their income through livestreams and man-made shopping festivals on the other, mass-producing Bauman’s “new poor.”
It’s also important to distinguish real needs from the false desires manufactured in livestream rooms. Real necessities are replacing daily supplies, essential appliances, and goods needed for survival; livestream pseudo-needs are idle goods bought for ambiance, trend-chasing, fear of missing low prices, or relief from work anxiety — goods that gather dust for years after purchase, bringing only a brief ordering thrill, leaving only debt and emptiness afterward.
Marathons: Packaged as Self-Discipline and Passion, Essentially a Closed Loop of Urban and Capitalist Consumerist Harvesting
The city marathons blooming everywhere in recent years have also long departed from the essence of simple fitness exercise, becoming a meticulously designed commercial game centered on stimulating consumption — belonging to the same manipulation system as livestream mega sales and man-made shopping festivals.
Local governments host races with the real goal of low-cost traffic acquisition of high-consumption crowds. Marathon participants are mostly middle-class office workers with stable incomes and disposable funds; out-of-town runners often stay 2-4 days, generating a full set of consumption across transport, hotels, dining, attractions, and local specialties. Although entry fees are only one or two hundred yuan, per-person total consumption can reach tens of thousands; the consumption leverage driven by races reaches 1:13, and a mid-sized city marathon’s single-event comprehensive economic benefit routinely runs to hundreds of millions. Cities string the course through scenic areas, business districts, and cultural-tourism projects, add music festivals, folk events, and resort packages, and use “most beautiful course” and “special medals” to build a city IP, attracting runners nationwide to cross cities and race repeatedly. The marathon is essentially a large commercial advertisement the city pays to place; the runners are the target customers who pay to enter.
Capital then manufactures demand layer by layer, alienating running into an endless consumption arms race. A sport originally doable in a pair of ordinary running shoes has been loaded with masses of pseudo-necessities manufactured by sports brands and race operators. Carbon-plate shoes cost 1,500-3,000 yuan; high-end sports watches run from thousands to tens of thousands; compression wear, protective gear, and energy supplies start at several thousand for the full set; limited and collaboration editions keep iterating; the running circle forms an invisible chain of contempt in which only a full set of high-end gear qualifies you as a “serious runner.” Reluctant to spend on gear, you get labeled unpassionate, perfunctory, insufficiently refined — completely homologous with “poor loser” personhood humiliation.
The races themselves also chop the entire participation experience into paid items. Popular races have acceptance rates below 10%, with charity direct-entry slots and broker slots scalped above 2,000 yuan; high-definition course photos, exclusive bibs, post-race recovery therapy, elite training camps, and private pacing companions are all charged separately; limited medals, digital collectibles, and race cultural-creative souvenirs marketed around “collection and commemoration,” sold at several times their few-dozen-yuan cost. Cities around the country stagger races throughout the year, manufacturing periodic consumption nodes similar to Double 11 and 618, hyping “rushing to a city marathon is romantic ritual sense,” pushing runners to race in multiple cities a year — flights, hotels, sightseeing, and specialties stacking up to tens of thousands of yuan annually.
The mind-shaping pitch then packages consumption with “self-discipline, passion, surpassing yourself,” completing the accompanying psychological PUA. “Running is the lowest-cost self-redemption for adults,” “finish a full marathon, achieve a life breakthrough” — defining 42 kilometers of running as the antidote to workplace involution and wage-worker exhaustion; “rushing a thousand li for one finisher’s medal,” “every city’s course is an exclusive life memento” — packaging participation, check-ins, and medal-flexing as indispensable life rituals; running clubs and social platforms collectively flaunt gear and race itineraries, manufacturing the conformist atmosphere of “everyone is running marathons” — ordinary people, fearing to fall out of the circle, are forced to consume and participate along with the trend.
This logic dovetails seamlessly with Bauman’s theory: the work ethic manufactures depression and exhaustion; the marathon is packaged as the emotional antidote, harvesting income at the same time; on one side you work overtime involuting to earn, on the other you spend money rushing to races in other cities and buying expensive gear — savings keep draining, breeding the “new poor”; once unable to afford cross-city races and high-end gear, you fall into self-doubt, believing you’re not ambitious enough and don’t understand life, and can only double your involution at work to earn money to support this consumption. Middle-class people with the means for full high-end gear and cross-city races use marathons to build a sense of superiority; low-income people, unable to participate, are marginalized by this sport-consumption system — forming a new standard of class division.
Of course, what needs distinguishing is not the marathon itself but the marathon consumption trap after capitalist alienation. Truly unburdened running is the daily jog near home — a pair of affordable shoes suffices, with no extra consumption, no circle one-upmanship, no need to travel to other cities to race, just exercise. The capital-built marathon, centered on city cultural tourism and brand profit, uses scarce slots, premium gear, and ritual-sense narrative to manufacture continuous consumption, turning a simple sport into a money-burning identity game. It is essentially no different from livestream mega sales and man-made consumption festivals: first packaging desire with emotional value, then designing layer upon layer of payment checkpoints to empty workers’ earnings, trapping ordinary people in the loop of “work to earn → consume for solace → work even harder.”
Real Estate and Cities: Dividends Created by Outsiders, Assets Harvested by Locals
The contrast a real-estate-agent friend witnessed in Xihu District pierces the cruelest stratification reality of our time. The older generation of professors within the system were allocated work-unit housing free of charge back then, holding it at zero cost; today even a cramped old apartment sells for millions; local original residents gained tens-of-millions compensation and multiple resettlement homes through demolition; whereas young outsiders come to the city with nothing, their bodies overdrawn by 996 and 007, and are still fed the line “only buying a home means having a home” — emptying their savings, shouldering twenty- or thirty-year mortgages, the rest of their lives doubly locked by bank and employer. The city’s office towers, roads, and residences — all economic increment — were heaped up by generation after generation of migrant workers, yet the land-appreciation dividends are taken entirely by those holding original property.
That so many people desperately come to the city knowing the cost is huge is not stupidity — it’s having no choice. Township and small-city industries are thin, high-paying jobs are scarce, and quality education and medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities; the rural path of self-sufficiency was long ago cut off by monetized life, and land provides no backstop. Coming to the city is the only choice left under duress — an extension of Bauman’s “work or die.”
Here exist two completely unequal wealth logics. Workers trade time for meager cash flow; salary growth can’t outrun housing prices or education and medical costs, and once unemployed or sick the system collapses. Asset holders gain passively from the era’s dividends: the more outsiders arrive and the more prosperous the city, the more valuable their housing becomes. Labor creates urban value, but wealth distribution tilts heavily toward holders of original assets.
“Only buying a home means having a home” is a precise double-layer discipline. Mentally, it binds property to belonging and personal dignity — unable to buy, you develop the inferiority of “not belonging to this city”; economically, the mortgage locks down decades of labor, making people afraid to resign or resist workplace over-extraction. Capital and companies, spotting the soft spot of the mortgage class, press down pay and raise labor intensity without scruple.
This stratification system remains stable for so long because it accomplishes several things at once: the urban-rural gap manufactures a continuously inflowing reserve army of labor, letting companies cut pay and eliminate at will; mortgage debt accomplishes mental control firmer than 996; the bottom tier is naturally split into local asset-holders and indebted outsiders, making unified consensus hard to form; consumerism then continues harvesting the remaining income. Ordinary people are trapped in the loop of “high-intensity work → repay mortgage + consume → dare not stop.”
But seeing all this clearly is not for mere envy. The older generation’s allocated housing and demolition dividends were products of a specific historical stage; the window has now closed. The point is to distinguish “settling down out of genuine need” from “housing anxiety manufactured by real estate” — no need to deny yourself for lacking original property. Structural distribution imbalance has never been caused by individuals not trying hard enough.
More Designed Consumption Traps: From Childhood to Old Age
Beyond the above, consumerism has designed a complete harvesting system covering every stage of life. These are not the misdeeds of any single company, but systematic commercial logic built around anxiety, information asymmetry, and human weakness. How much an ordinary person must earn in a lifetime depends less on ability than on how many pits they step into.
The education-anxiety pit: the whole family bleeding continuously. Children’s interest classes sell anxiety with “don’t let your child lose at the starting line,” luring with 9.9-yuan trial classes, then pushing annual cards, grade exams, and intensive camps — most children end up with a few certificates and idle equipment. School-district housing gambles the family balance sheet on uncertain educational resources; when policy shifts, high-priced homes instantly depreciate. Professional certification and paid knowledge courses sell the “rising again fantasy” — outdated courses with no hands-on practice, thousands or tens of thousands in tuition exchanged for a pile of recorded videos.
The financial-debt trap: overdrawing future income. Huabei, credit cards, and phone installments fly the “0 interest” banner while actual annualized fees often exceed 15%, and paying only the minimum lets interest compound. Ponzi schemes and fake wealth management first lure with small rebates, then abscond after you invest heavily. Return-type insurance and dividend insurance carry expensive premiums and low coverage; decades of premiums surrendered mid-way lose most of the principal. These products are designed precisely to lock up future cash flow so people dare not stop working.
Consumerism’s invisible harvest: manufacturing false needs. Blind boxes, collaboration apparel, and internet-famous merchandise costing a few yuan are sold at dozens of times the price, using emotional value to make people hoard useless things. Electronics are planned for obsolescence — problems appear just after the warranty expires, repair prices approach a new unit, forcing repeated upgrades. Livestream commerce uses out-of-stock low-price traffic drivers, fake discounts, and near-expiry products mixed in; impulsive orders are hard to return or exchange.
The health, eldercare, and life-service pits. Health supplements with exaggerated efficacy, massage cards, and moxibustion packages are sold specifically to old people afraid of death and their filial children. Medical aesthetics and gym annual cards lure at low prices, then push ten-thousand-yuan programs or lifetime cards; when stores close, prepaid funds can’t be recovered. The repair industry turns small problems into big ones and raises prices after disassembly — ordinary people, who do not understand technology, can only be carved up at will.
The entrepreneurship-franchise get-rich scam: the trap of ordinary people’s rising dream. Internet-famous snack and milk-tea franchises start at tens of thousands in fees, plus mandatory high-price ingredient purchases; many stores don’t last half a year before closing. Short-video livestream selling, unmanned vending, and “AI light entrepreneurship” hype “zero-cost passive income,” collecting service and training fees first, then delivering no orders and no support. Stranger-still acquaintance scams are more dangerous: out of face-saving obligation no contract is signed — the money is gone and the relationship is broken too.
The underlying logic of these harvesting routines is highly consistent: first manufacture anxiety, then lower the entry threshold, exploit information asymmetry and human weakness, and convert short-term small expenditures into long-term large debts. The work ethic forces you to earn desperately; these traps then make you vomit up all the money you earned — or even take on debt.
Holding a few simple principles can avoid most traps: refuse any work project that requires paying money before earning; keep long-term large expenditures below 30% of family income; refuse large prepaid stored-value cards and multi-year packages; stay away from all “guaranteed profit, passive income, high return” investments; distinguish genuine needs from emotional-premium consumption — not for face, not following trends, not overdrawing into debt.
III. The Twin Cages: The Double Domestication of Body and Mind
By this point, a complete two-way cage has fully taken shape, with countless ordinary people mired deep inside and nowhere to escape. The work ethic traps the body: forcing us to involute without limits and squeeze our own interests, trading health and time for meager survival resources, accepting unfair labor distribution; consumerism traps the mind: manufacturing endless anxiety and comparison, making us define self-worth by wealth and consumption, forced to overdraft consumption and keep up appearances to escape the label of the bottom tier. We work desperately not for self-growth but only to avoid elimination; we consume assiduously not to please ourselves but only to avoid being mocked as outdated.
The greatest irony is that this system never pursues fairness — only stability and control. The upper class forever holds the rule-making power, enjoying capital dividends and class advantages; while bottom-tier workers, however they struggle, cannot escape the preset fate: in youth and vigor, their value is over-extracted without limit; past thirty-five, having lost high-efficiency output and with rising employment costs, they are ruthlessly “optimized” away. Former diligence, excess devotion, and self-sacrifice are worth not a cent in capital’s cost accounting.
IV. Clarity and Self-Rescue: Taking Back the Right to Evaluate Your Life
Seeing this truth clearly is not passive lying flat, but true clarity and self-rescue.
We must thoroughly strip away the false cognition capital has granted us: work is merely an equal-exchange transaction for making a living, not the entire value of life; the level of salary is merely the price of labor and can never define personal dignity. The “growth” companies speak of is mostly pseudo-growth that domesticates us into bearing pressure unpaid and submitting to over-extraction; true growth is mastering your own time, accumulating transferable abilities, and guarding your own life and bottom line.
We must refuse bottom-tier mutual exclusion and self-blame — no longer PUA ourselves with “the bad economy is my own incompetence,” no longer judging others or debasing ourselves by consumption levels. Unemployment at thirty-five, forced pay cuts and involution — these are not personal failures but the inevitable result of structural interest-squeezing; being ordinary with a stable income and a solid life has never been a life deficiency but the most precious essence of living.
Bauman wrote Work, Consumerism and the New Poor never to make us despair, but to help us break the game: shake off the moral shackles of the work ethic, leap out of consumerism’s anxiety trap, and take back the right to evaluate our lives from the hands of capital.
No need to consume yourself over the macro environment you cannot control, no need to over-extract yourself for other people’s rules, no need to deny your own life by worldly standards. Labor deserves respect; ordinariness deserves decency; human dignity has never needed the endorsement of salary and consumption. Escaping the cage of involution, leaping free of mental fetters, living well and guarding one’s original heart — this is ordinary people’s clearest and most powerful counterattack against this cold system.
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