Every graduation season, countless young people still flood into the workplace holding the belief that “hard work will get you ahead.” But reality is giving the opposite answer through one vivid life after another.
In March 2026, 41-year-old graduate-exam prep star teacher Zhang Xuefeng died of sudden cardiac death after running 7 kilometers; in November 2025, 32-year-old programmer Gao Guanghui collapsed on a weekend after seven straight years of getting off work after 9 p.m. every day. Cases like these aren’t isolated incidents but systemic tragedies. When overtime becomes the norm, sudden death trends on hot searches, and debt presses down until you can’t breathe, we must face a question head-on: Is working for others still really worth it?
My judgment is: working for others has long since degenerated into an involution game with terrible cost-effectiveness — trading health for salary, trading freedom for survival, and ultimately often ending up with neither money nor health.
1. Betting with Your Life: Those Lives Over-Drawn
The cost of working for others shows up first in health. And this cost, once paid, can never be redeemed.
Zhang Xuefeng, 41. Tens of millions of followers across the internet, a company with annual revenue over 800 million, yet on the afternoon of March 24, after finishing a run, he suddenly felt unwell and, despite three hours of resuscitation, could not be saved. He wasn’t undisciplined — he ran a cumulative 72 kilometers in March. But a lifestyle of long-term daily sleep of under 5 hours, staying up until the small hours, and working year-round without a break had long since overloaded his heart. Ironically, he advised students “don’t push yourself to death,” yet he himself was swallowed by the logic of “you must keep pushing forever.”
Gao Guanghui, 32. A Guangzhou programmer who got off work after 9 p.m. every day for seven straight years, on call anytime on weekends. On the day he died of sudden cardiac death, he collapsed at home, and even during resuscitation he was pulled into a new work group chat. His family applied for a work-injury finding; the company first offered 390,000 in “humanitarian condolence money” to dodge responsibility, and only after much wrangling was the work injury recognized three months later. The value of a life was casually written off as “humanitarian compensation.”
Feng Yulang, 26. A Shaanxi designer who worked over 19 days of overtime a month and collapsed in the office in the small hours, his computer still open with work software. The human-resources bureau rejected the work-injury application on the grounds that “death occurred more than 10 hours after getting off work, and he had briefly played a game.” The fact of long-term overtime was ignored, and a life was casually negated with the phrase “not in a working state.”
Man So-and-so, a veteran employee. After working nearly 16 hours straight, he returned to the dorm and died of sudden cardiac death; judicial appraisal found it closely related to excessive fatigue. The court awarded 260,000 in damages, while the family claimed 820,000. The cost of a company’s violation is extremely low, and the value of a worker’s life is severely underestimated.
The four above are extreme cases that made the news. But more people’s experiences are chronic, unseen, and ultimately not even newsworthy — including my own.
I too once believed in that fixed life script: work hard, strive hard, buy a house and a car, get married and have children. In my thirties, I did achieve it — bought a house, bought a car, started a family, had a child. I thought that as long as I followed the steps along, I could hold on to this stability.
For the sake of this “stability,” I sold almost all of myself into it. When I first joined, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the work, getting up at three or four in the morning during leave to handle faults; when accompanying family to the supermarket, my laptop was on standby at all times; even while on vacation at the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, I crouched on the steps with my laptop on my back solving client problems. When the company needed me, I was an “outstanding employee”; when performance fluctuated, I was a “core backbone.”
After a few years, IgA nephropathy, ulcerative colitis, and chronic atrophic gastritis came knocking one after another, controlled long-term by medication. And my salary didn’t grow year by year; the promotion path instead got narrower and narrower, the supervisor led the involution, and everyone in the group performed overtime. When I saw clearly that “giving more wouldn’t be repaid with more,” I chose to only complete my own duties and no longer cooperate with meaningless internal friction.
The result? Because my past salary was on the high side, I was seen as a “cost burden.” My former selfless backstopping efforts were written off with a single stroke, replaced by marginalization and PUA suppression, and finally I was branded with the label “values mismatch” and laid off in December 2025.
Even crueler was what came after. At 35, with the industry in decline, AI advancing, and companies laying off staff, I originally thought that with my rich experience and solid ability, I could easily find a satisfying job. Reality slapped me in the face — I couldn’t even find a job at the same pay. Most of the résumés I sent out were read but not replied to, and the vast majority of companies treat people merely as consumables, used up and tossed aside — a practice that, in the eyes of certain vested-interest groups, is tacitly allowed or even encouraged.
My body broke down, my position was gone, the mortgage remained, the family remained, and the health and unpaid effort I had over-drawn in the earlier period all returned to zero. That life script I had once believed in without doubt completely collapsed in the year I turned 35.
The logic behind this is exactly the same as ancient emperors slaughtering their meritorious officials after securing the throne: relied upon in times of crisis, feared once the situation is stable; when merit is too great it alarms the ruler, and when the price is too high you will surely be discarded. The workplace never speaks of permanent loyalty — only of temporary value.
This use-up-and-toss model is tacitly condoned at the level of vested interests. Cutting labor costs directly boosts book profits, so age screening and staff streamlining become routine operations; technological iteration, which ought to benefit the whole industry, is instead turned into a tool for eliminating veteran employees. Capital only pursues maximum benefit, and an individual’s career and family burdens are not within its priority considerations.
Back then, following the worldly script, I bought a house, started a family, and took on loans, pushed forward by the rhetoric of striving and settling down, and step by step got locked into shackles. Now that the predicament of unemployment has arrived, the monthly repayments and family expenses won’t stop, yet the employment channel grows ever narrower, leaving me trapped between advancing and retreating.
Ordinary people are ultimately just replaceable parts within the system; the era’s dividend never reaches the bottom tier, yet the risks and costs are borne by them first. Past obsessions have already come to nothing, and all I can do is let go of fixed expectations, adjust my mindset, and search anew for a way to survive.
2. Rights in Name Only: The Law Is Written on Paper, Reality Is Written on the Boss’s Face
If the law could truly protect workers, the tragedies above would at least receive reasonable aftercare. But in reality, the Labor Law is more like a scrap of empty paper.
Overtime without compensation has become the industry’s default rule. The Labor Law stipulates no more than 1 hour of overtime a day and no more than 36 hours a month, with overtime paid at 1.5 to 3 times the wage. But “996” and “big-small weeks” flourish everywhere, and overtime pay is packaged as “voluntary overtime” and “striving culture.”
Many companies plaster their walls with slogans, hang wolf-culture banners in meeting rooms, post ranking boards beside workstations, and circulate good-news bulletins in group chats about “so-and-so colleague pulling an all-nighter to go live.” They package bottomless over-drawing as “pursuing excellence,” beautify forced overtime as “self-driven,” and twist the inability to resist into “having the right values.” In 2025, an e-commerce company even publicly commended an employee who “worked 160 hours of overtime,” packaging the limits of the human body as “selfless devotion.”
Workers dare not defend their rights — afraid of being branded “not striving,” afraid of bottom-ranked elimination, afraid of being marginalized, they can only silently endure.
Getting a work injury recognized is as hard as climbing to heaven. Gao Guanghui died of sudden cardiac death after seven years of all-nighters; his initial work-injury claim was rejected, and it took three months of defending his rights to succeed. Feng Yulang died of sudden cardiac death while working overtime in the office; the human-resources bureau refused on the grounds of “not working hours.” Companies refuse to provide attendance records, leaving workers defenseless; cross-region work injuries also get tangled in jurisdictional disputes. The time cost, energy cost, and financial cost of defending one’s rights far exceed the compensation ultimately obtained.
The double shrinkage of salary and security. Raises can’t keep up with inflation, mortgage, and childcare costs, and the purchasing power of take-home pay declines year by year. After 35, companies lay off first, recruitment only hires young people, and middle-aged workers face the dead end of “unemployment equals elimination.” Not to mention that some companies don’t pay social insurance, contribute to the housing fund at the minimum base, and arbitrarily deduct paid annual leave.
The law is the bottom line, not a guarantee. When the cost of breaking the law is far lower than the cost of obeying it, companies naturally choose to trample the rules. It isn’t that workers don’t want to defend their rights — it’s that defending one’s rights is itself a battle destined to lose money.
3. The Influence of Cultural Notions: Chicken-Blood on the Wall, a Pitfall Beneath Your Feet
If the absence of law is a failure at the institutional level, then a company’s internal “striving culture” is an encirclement-and-annihilation at the spiritual level. It needs no overtime pay and bears no legal liability; it only needs to plaster the walls with slogans, forward good-news bulletins in group chats, and shout slogans at the annual meeting, and it can get employees to voluntarily give up rest, over-draw their health, and squeeze their own interests.
Youzan-Style 996: Treating Illegality as Glory
In 2019, at Youzan’s annual meeting, an executive publicly announced the implementation of the 996 work system. CEO Bai Ya said bluntly: “If he can’t be reached about work after getting off work, and doesn’t reply to work messages on weekends, then he can’t adapt to our place here.” Taking more than 3 days of leave around statutory holidays requires reporting to the CEO; he even said, “resting for ten days straight means it’ll take a long time to get back into a working state.”
The core logic of this culture is: work is above everything; personal life, family, and health must all yield to the business. Dare to leave on time, and you’re “not striving enough”; want to rest on the weekend, and you’re “not a fit for the company.”
The 996 Gurus of the Internet World
Youzan is no isolated case. Treating illegality as “corporate culture” and employees as “consumables” is practically an open secret in the internet world.
Jack Ma: “996 is a blessing,” “being able to do 996 is a tremendous fortune.” He later walked it back to “not mandatory,” but the Alibaba ecosystem has long had implicit 996, big-small weeks, and performance tied to overtime.
Liu Qiangdong (Richard Liu): “People who drift through the days aren’t my brothers,” “the 8-hour workday is for losers.” In its early years JD enforced 996 with no overtime pay, and the unwritten rule of “you must resign at 35” was made public.
Xu Bo (Duoyi Network): In 2025 he publicly blasted “the labor law has an enormous number of problems,” saying “company rules are greater than the labor contract.” He declared, “wages are an all-inclusive salary system that already includes overtime pay; if you sleep at work I can deduct it all,” and “if you don’t like it, get lost.”
Zhou Hongyi (360): “Not working overtime means not working hard,” “young people shouldn’t fuss over overtime pay,” “if you haven’t achieved anything by 35 you’re a failure.” 360 has long had big-small weeks and late-night meetings; HR publicly says, “if you can’t accept overtime, don’t come.”
Zhang Yiming (ByteDance): uses “delayed gratification” and “pursuing the extreme” to package a high-pressure culture. The ByteDance ecosystem has implicit 996, Feishu (Lark) online 24 hours, and HR treats “able to withstand pressure and work overtime” as a core recruitment criterion.
There are also some lesser-known small bosses who are even more brazen. Wang Mingyu, boss of a certain new-energy company in Henan, said in a 2024 recording, verbatim: “I don’t care about the law; I just want the law to come rectify me,” “during the probation period, if I say fire, I fire,” “I’ll spend 1 million to ruin your reputation.” A small boss in Jiangsu publicly threatened in a group chat: “May Day only gets 3 days off; if you object, come process your resignation tomorrow,” “March wages delayed to May 10; if you don’t like it, just leave.”
The common traits of these bosses are extremely clear: denying the authority of the law, believing “company rules are greater than the labor law”; beautifying over-exploitation, calling 996 “striving” and unpaid overtime “growth”; objectifying employees, “tossing them out when useless” after 35; manufacturing anxiety, using “if you don’t strive you’ll be eliminated” to PUA employees and make them involute themselves.
Slogan Walls + Values Assessment: An Endless Trap of Over-Exploitation
“Today’s best result is tomorrow’s minimum requirement” — this line seems to inspire breakthroughs, but is in fact an endless trap of over-exploitation. Today you give it everything to hit 100 points; tomorrow the standard automatically rises to 120 points, with no end in sight and never any chance to rest. It’s just like a blindfolded donkey circling a millstone endlessly, thinking it’s moving forward when in fact it’s forever being consumed in place, until its strength runs out and it collapses.
Companies also push systems like values assessments and “Youzan coin” peer reviews, effectively forcing employees to pick sides and curry favor. Your value doesn’t need to be proven by performance — it needs to be proven by “obedience.” Refusing to cooperate in performing overtime means “values mismatch” — which is precisely the label many people were slapped with in December 2025.
Beautifying Overtime, Blurring Boundaries
“Strivers first,” “overtime is glory,” “if you don’t strive you’re out” — these slogans continuously shape employees’ notions: overtime isn’t forced, it’s proactive growth; sacrificing your life isn’t a loss, it’s for the future; over-drawing your health isn’t foolish, it’s proof of striving. Over the long term, employees fall into a vicious cycle of self-negation + infinite anxiety, forever feeling they aren’t working hard enough and never daring to stop.
Anxious employees are more obedient, more willing to work overtime, and less daring to resign — which is exactly what the company wants.
4. The Shackles of Debt: How Loans Turn Working for Others into a Life Sentence
If over-drawn health and lost rights are the visible costs of working for others, then debt is the hidden noose around your neck.
Behind many tragedies lies forced, desperate striving born of debt. That 35-year-old real-estate agent store manager in Beijing, single-handedly supporting three children and aging parents, working year-round without rest and enduring corporal-punishment-style assessments, ultimately died suddenly. Without the heavy family expenses and debt pressure, he wouldn’t have had to risk his life like that.
Mortgage, car loan, consumer loan — layered one on top of another. Empty out several generations’ savings for a down payment and take on a huge mortgage for decades; follow the trend to buy a car, with fixed monthly deductions; over-draw credit cards and online consumer loans, pursuing a quality of life beyond your income. Ahead-of-time consumption is glamorous for a moment, but the bills arrive every month on schedule. Once you hit unemployment, illness, or industry layoffs and your income is cut off, missed payments, defaults, and damaged credit follow one after another.
Debt completely strips away your right to choose. Someone without loans can switch lanes when work isn’t going well, can stop and rest when body and mind are exhausted, and dares to say no in the face of unreasonable over-exploitation. But someone bound by mortgage and car loan can only keep compromising endlessly. Knowing that forced overtime is illegal and that your rights are being violated, you still grit your teeth and persevere; knowing that high-intensity work damages your body, you still dare not lightly speak of resigning. A whole life spent rushing and toiling around debt, with paper salary leaving almost nothing after loan repayments, and frugal living still leaving you stretched thin.
Behind the desperate toil of 32-year-old Gao Guanghui and 26-year-old Feng Yulang lay, for the most part, family expenses and repayment pressure. Ahead-of-time over-drawn consumer desire ultimately exacted a heavy price in health and even life.
5. The Collapse of Cost-Effectiveness: A Deal Destined to Lose Money
Put working for others on the scales, and input and output are severely unbalanced.
Health costs are irreversible. Long-term all-nighters, high pressure, and prolonged sitting lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and depression striking ever younger. Hair loss and insomnia in your 20s, heart attacks and strokes in your 30s — money can’t buy back a life, much less repair a body.
Time costs can’t be redeemed. Over 12 hours a day of commuting plus work, weekend overtime, no rest all year. No time to accompany family, care for children, or honor parents; no time to travel, study, or develop hobbies. What workers sell isn’t just their labor — it’s the freedom of their entire life.
Risk costs are borne entirely by the individual. After 35 you can be laid off at any time; a serious illness or one sudden death can drag down an entire family. Even more ironic, when you discover that cost-effectiveness has collapsed and try to “lie flat” to cut losses, the company will immediately clear you out for “values mismatch” — the health, time, and loyalty you invested in the earlier period won’t be converted into any compensation. A boss who loses money can go bankrupt; an employee who has an accident can only consider himself unlucky. All the risk shifts downward, all the gains shift upward.
In the short term, working for others trades a meager salary to barely scrape by; in the long term, health collapses, time runs out, freedom is lost; and by the time you wake up and want to pull yourself out, the system has already swept you out the door. In extreme cases, you die of overwork — the life is gone, the money is gone, the family is broken. This isn’t an investment; it’s one-way consumption.
6. Taking Japan as a Mirror: Japan Has Already Walked This Road
Japan went from Showa-era involution kings to Heisei-era shut-in slackers over a full thirty years. We think that’s a distant foreign tale of the past, but it’s actually a mirror now reflecting us.
Involuting Credentials: “Four Passes, Five Fails,” the Exam Hell
In the late Showa period (1970s–1980s), Japan’s economy took off, companies offered lifetime employment and seniority-based pay, and a prestigious school = an iron rice bowl = a leap in social class. The whole nation madly involuted over education: the popular slogan was “four passes, five fails” — sleep 4 hours and pass, sleep 5 hours and fail. Tutoring started from elementary school, “education mothers” accompanied their children’s studies full-time, and students repeated for three to five years to get into Todai or Waseda, all for one prestigious-school ticket. More and more college students, credential inflation, and everyone thought “hard work will win.”
This is exactly the same as us today desperately taking graduate-exam and civil-service exams and involuting over big tech. In 2025 nearly 5 million people took the graduate entrance exam, with an admission rate under 20%; credentials are devaluing faster than diplomas can be printed.
Involuting Housing Prices: The Whole Nation Leverages Up, the Bubble Blown to the Sky
After the 1985 Plaza Accord, the yen surged and capital flooded madly into the property market. At the 1989 peak, Tokyo land prices could buy the entire United States. Ordinary families emptied their savings and added bank loans to get on board for “one house for a lifetime.” Consumerism prevailed — buying luxury cars, name brands, overseas travel — and ahead-of-time consumption became the norm.
Everyone believed: housing prices will rise forever, hard work will be rewarded, a loan equals happiness. This is almost exactly the same as our property-market frenzy, whole-nation leveraging up, and emptying six wallets from 2015 to 2021.
The Bubble Bursts: All That Effort Returns to Zero
In 1990–1991, Japan’s stock market and property market both crashed. Housing prices in the six major metropolitan areas fell 70% in 3 years, and national land prices lost three-quarters of their value over 12 years. Lifetime employment collapsed, and from 1993 to 2005 the country entered the employment ice age, with recruitment numbers plunging from 1.65 million to 230,000.
The cruellest part is: the mortgage remains, the assets are gone; the job is gone, the debt remains.
The Heisei Shut-In Slacker: It’s Not That They Don’t Want to Work Hard — It’s That Hard Work Is No Longer Rewarded
Taking Japan as a Mirror (《以日为鉴》) focuses on the dankai junior generation (born 1974–1983). They experienced the complete “from heaven to hell”: as children they were fed “study hard → get into a good university → join a big company → buy a house and marry → a happy life,” involuted madly over credentials in adolescence, and the bubble burst just as they graduated. Prestigious-school diplomas devalued, good jobs disappeared, and they could barely find informal work with low, unstable income. Mortgage pressure and high living costs meant hard work brought no visible reward, and the more they involuted the poorer they got. Finally their mindset collapsed: since hard work is useless, better not to work hard at all.
Thus emerged the iconic low-desire groups of the Heisei era:
- Freeters: don’t take regular jobs, work odd jobs, work a day and scrape by a day
- Parasite singles (NEETs living off parents): don’t work, don’t marry, don’t buy a house, rely on parents for support in old age
- Hikikomori (shut-ins): don’t go out, don’t see people, isolated from the world; there are 1.46 million in Japan, of whom 1.03 million are middle-aged
- Heisei shut-in slackers: don’t buy a house, don’t buy a car, don’t date, don’t have children, without desire or ambition, just being alive is enough
It isn’t that they don’t want to work hard — it’s that the era completely pulled away the reward for hard work.
We Are Replicating This Road
Japan went from Showa involution kings to Heisei shut-in slackers over thirty years; we’ve gone from property-market frenzy and whole-nation involution to today over twenty-odd years. Credential inflation, housing-price bubble, the age-35 crisis, ahead-of-time consumer debt — every step treads in Japan’s footprints.
Don’t wait until the bubble bursts, unemployment and pay cuts hit, debt weighs you down, and health collapses before you remember Japan’s lesson.
7. Suffering Under a Rising Dynasty, Suffering Under a Falling One: The Millennial Cycle of a Zero-Sum Game
Japan is no isolated case. If you pull the lens back a bit further, you’ll find an even crueler law: whether in a prosperous age or a declining one, bottom-tier laborers are always the ones bearing the pressure.
When the economy takes off, capital and the upper class seize the vast majority of the wealth dividend, while ordinary people get only meager scraps. Housing and prices keep climbing, and the costs of education, healthcare, and elder care press down; just to make ends meet, people are forced to accept 996 overtime, boundary-less work, and being entangled in debt. Just as I experienced myself — personal time, health, and time with family all yield to work; in times of crisis you’re used desperately as a core main force, and once your value is exhausted you’re marginalized and eliminated. In the prosperous phase, wealth keeps concentrating upward while all the toil is borne by the bottom tier.
When the economy slows, the crisis hits the bottom tier first. Companies lay off staff, cut pay, and shrink positions; the age-35 workplace threshold grows ever harsher, and the work seniority you toiled to accumulate is voided at any time. Debt doesn’t disappear because of unemployment; mortgage and credit payments keep being collected on schedule, and once income is cut off, life instantly falls into hardship. The upper class can rely on assets and power to dodge risk, while ordinary people can only face the torment of survival head-on.
This logic is everywhere if you open the history books.
Emperor Wu of Han: Expanding Territory, the People Foot the Bill
Emperor Wu of Han struck the Xiongnu in the north and opened up the Western Regions; his territory was unprecedentedly vast and his fame towering. But all this military glory was borne entirely by the bottom-tier people: years of large-scale warfare, taxes layered upon layers, land tax, poll tax, and heavy tax burdens constantly increasing, with farmers handing over most of their harvest; corvée and military service without end, able-bodied young men pulled from the fields to garrison the border and fight, fields left fallow and starving corpses everywhere; state monopoly over salt and iron on people’s daily necessities, deliberately jacking up prices. Projecting power abroad in all directions bought, in return, the impoverishment of common livelihoods, with the bottom tier struggling at the edge of subsistence and life-and-death.
The Zhenguan Reign: The History Books’ Illusion of Peace
The Zhenguan reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang is praised as national peace and security, but in fact the burden on the bottom tier was never truly lightened. Under the fubing (militia) system, soldiers farmed in peacetime and, in wartime, provided their own provisions to go to battle; the people had both to till the land to support their families and to bear the cost of military service. Grand palaces, cities, and water works were built, conscripting laborers without pay, delaying the farming season with no compensation whatsoever. Great aristocratic clans and bureaucratic elites continuously encroached on land, reducing owner-farmers to tenant farmers bearing high rents. In the court there was song and dance and all nations came to pay tribute, while the bottom-tier people still toiled hard, silently paying all the costs for the prosperity of the golden age.
The Kangxi-Qianlong Prosperity: Population Explosion, Extreme Over-Exploitation of Survival Pressure
During the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns of the Qing dynasty, the territory was at its peak and the population surged, hailed as feudalism’s last golden age. But the reform merging the poll tax into the land tax, though seemingly abolishing the poll tax, actually folded miscellaneous taxes into the land tax, with harsh new levies continuously added afterward, so the people’s tax burden did not decrease. Under the closed-door policy, the powerful hoarded goods and profiteered; in disaster years grain prices soared, and ordinary people hit by natural calamity were easily driven from their homes. Officials at every level skimmed taxes layer upon layer and squeezed the people’s wealth, so the court’s fixed quota, once it reached the common folk, multiplied several times over. On the surface the golden age was wealthy and prosperous, but the wealth gap widened sharply, the powerful indulged in lavish pleasure, and the bottom tier worked all year only to barely sustain survival.
Later history books keep beautifying these golden ages, holding them up as benchmarks of prosperity. But strip away the gorgeous outer garment and you can see clearly: every towering, famous dynastic golden age was piled up without exception through over-exploitation and sacrificing the interests of the bottom-tier people. The glory of the upper class, the expansion of territory, the splendor of the court — the costs all pressed down onto ordinary people.
At the ancient battlefield of Changping in Gaoping, Shanxi, more than two thousand years later, along field ridges and roadsides and on earthen slopes and cliffs you can still see exposed white bones. Whenever it rains, human bones wash out, and villagers often dig up bones while farming. In the Yonglu pit of corpses and bones, layers upon layers of human bones are preserved in their original state — that’s no scenic spot; it’s over 400,000 ordinary soldiers who were massacred and buried alive, someone’s sons, someone’s husbands, someone’s fathers. The history books did not record their names; they left only the single line “Bai Qi buried alive over 400,000 Zhao soldiers.”
A general’s success is built on ten thousand withered bones. No one remembers the white bones on the battlefield, and no one mentions the sacrifices within the golden age either.
And those bosses who preach “striving” and push 996 are merely middlemen agents on the chain of interests. The people who truly control the rules of distribution and set the rules of the game are far higher up. Companies cutting labor costs, capital jacking up prices and housing, the limited quota of positions — these are all zero-sum games: what one side gains must be what the other loses. There’s no common win-win, only this growing as that shrinks. Liu Bang and Zhu Yuanzhang, once secure on the throne, liquidated their meritorious officials; companies, once past their difficulties, lay off high-paid veteran employees — both are essentially about securing one’s own interests by sacrificing others’ rights.
In ancient times they harvested the people through taxes, corvée, and land annexation; in modern times they bind lives through workplace over-exploitation, financial debt, and consumer involution. Technology, institutions, and lifestyles iterate and advance, yet the class gap, the squeezing of interests, and the struggle of the bottom tier have never disappeared.
When a dynasty rises, the people toil and suffer for the dividend; when it falls, the people face hardship for the crisis. The forms of the world change a thousand ways, but the logic of distribution at the bottom has never changed.
8. Clear-Eyed Awareness: What Can We Do?
I don’t preach lying flat, nor do I deny the value of all work. But clear-eyed awareness is the prerequisite for change.
First, see through the PUA nature of “striving.” Zhang Xuefeng involuted desperately until he died of sudden cardiac death at 41; Gao Guanghui worked hard for 7 years in exchange for the phrase “humanitarian compensation” — the truth of involution isn’t that hard work leads to success, but that hard work is infinitely over-exploited by capital. The harder you push, the more the company earns, and the more danger you’re in.
Second, refuse to be held hostage by debt. Buy a house within your means, keep transportation tools good enough, and match daily consumption to your income level. Only by not taking on loans beyond your capacity to bear can you retain the confidence to say “no.” Being debt-free and light isn’t conservatism — it’s leaving yourself a way out.
Third, hold the bottom line of health. However busy you are, ensure sleep; however urgent things are, get regular check-ups. A job can be changed; you only have one body. Those excuses of “I’ll rest once this busy stretch is over” often never reach the day they’re fulfilled.
Finally, reduce your dependence on a single job. Develop a side hustle, learn skills, accumulate assets, so that “selling your time” isn’t your only path. The essence of the age-35 crisis is that your income sources are too singular.
In addition, see clearly an even more underlying law: whatever is hyped sky-high to urge ordinary people to pile in is almost always a trap.
The old saying isn’t wrong — if burning incense and worshipping Buddha could truly defy heaven and change fate, temples would surely close their doors and strictly control the threshold, rather than letting ordinary commoners worship at will. Reality is the same: everything the whole nation chases and public opinion takes turns hyping hides shackles that trap ordinary people behind it.
The heavily-promoted house-buying craze urges ordinary people to empty their savings for a down payment and sign a mortgage of twenty or thirty years. The dividend period was long since carved up by early capital; by the time the whole nation enters, all that’s left is buying at the top. After taking on huge debt, you instantly lose the right to choose, forced to accept bottomless overtime and workplace over-exploitation, toiling half a lifetime just to repay the loan.
The car-buying and ahead-of-time consumption packaged by marketing are another cage of enslavement. Cars depreciate fast, car loans apply pressure on schedule, and credit cards and consumer loans create the illusion of an exquisite life, constantly ratcheting up material desire. Once desire takes root, income can never keep up with spending, and you can only keep working desperately to plug the hole, your whole life dragged along by consumer desire and credit bills.
Hot industries and popular lanes follow the same logic. Whenever some industry is hyped across the whole internet as an “overnight-wealth dividend” or “low-barrier entrepreneurship,” large numbers of ordinary people follow the trend and pile in, ultimately intensifying involution and thinning profits. Quality resources, core orders, and profitable channels are always held by the top players; ordinary people entering can only slaughter each other and become the bottom-tier consumables of the industry.
Truly scarce opportunities are always quiet, circulating only within a small circle. Whenever something is trumpeted to call the whole nation in, it means the harvest window has already opened. Only by not following the whole-nation craze, not lightly taking on large debt, refusing to be swept along by consumerism, and not blindly piling into involuted lanes can you leap out of the fate of being enslaved.
Working for others is for the sake of living, not for the sake of giving up your life. You only have one life, and health is not renewable. When the odds of a game have already fallen to the extreme low, the most rational choice isn’t to increase your bet, but to re-examine whether you really have to play at all.
Hold the bottom line, travel light, and only then can you live at ease.
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