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China’s Slacker Youths: Why They Went from 'Lying Flat' to 'Let It Rot' [video]
- rektide 4y agoTaking it from a personal to a social-critique is a fairly big shift. One is about the rat-race & the will & struggle to keep oneself strongly advancing. The other is more about the value of society as a whole, an assessment of the values one finds about. I'm utterly decoupled from the experience here, & could be vastly off. But just looking at the slogans, the shift from introspection to extrospection was immediately notable to me. Two negative-ish things of note, from the first couple minutes in: "200 people on forums" is, early on (27s into a 45m program), introduced as the core "bai lan movement". Honestly just a weird line that undersells. Second, this is Mediacorp, "a Singaporean public broadcast service" (as Youtube informs me). Almost all media has a slant & I'm not sure of this one, but something to be cautious of. One of the first people interviewed's primary complaint seems to be how boring it is doing the same thing every single day every single week. It's always seemed a waste to me, how industrialization's desire to make us all into X Y or Z shaped cogs in a machine prevents us from gaining real experience, from getting exposure to different pieces of the system. I've always fantasized about companies that constantly remix teams, that cast people (temporarily) into positions/roles well outside their norm. The happy-warrior mode of operation should embrace dynamism, but most organizations involve prestige by owning an ever-increasing chunk of the org-chart that you keep in-line; terrible.