Lying flat
Issue 61 - 06 July 2021 (6-min read)
The millennials tried it through social media trends at first. They planked at random locations and then they turned into mannequins for some clicks. Now that they are facing existential threats and inheriting a world significantly less prosperous than they were promised, this generation is adopting 'lying flat' as a lifestyle.
This week in The Global Tiller, we learn about 'tang ping’, a new lifestyle gaining popularity in China, much to the displeasure of its government. We find out what makes it a compelling choice that could potentially become a thorn in the side for other governments too. When we feel helpless in the face of mounting crises, isn’t lying low the only form of resistance left?
The youth in China have coined the phrase tang ping (literally meaning 'lying flat') to describe their answer to the increasingly oppressive work culture that offers little rewards. The phrase became popular after a young man posted on an online forum about surviving unemployment for two years. Instead of worrying about what society deemed 'success', he decided to just lie down. He embraced his own manifesto to the extent that he got himself an acting licence and gets paid to literally lie down and play dead.
This movement has gained a lot of popularity in China with thousands of other people jumping on board. Others describe this lifestyle as doing the bare minimum. “According to the mainstream standard, a decent lifestyle must include working hard, trying to get good results on work evaluations, striving to buy a home and a car, and making babies. However, I loaf around on the job whenever I can, refusing to work overtime, not worrying about promotions, and not participating in corporate drama,” explained one follower.
The defeatist mentality has, however, not gone down well for the Chinese state. Beijing sees it as an affront to its economic ambitions and mentions of 'lying flat' are promptly censored online. Academics explain that this lifestyle threatens economic productivity that forms the backbone of China’s future growth.
But what’s happening in China is certainly not an anomaly. This dejection is global and is resulting from what the World Health Organization calls 'burn-out'. While it is not classified as a medical condition, it is an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that causes exhaustion, cynicism towards one’s job and reduced professional efficacy. Sounds familiar?
Be it a full-time job with inflexible working conditions, or several part-time gigs where you can never ascertain how much you’ll make by the end of the year, working in these times is complex. Workplaces may be tempted to train their millennial workforce to develop more resilience to cope with burn-out but studies show that this is counterproductive as it just adds one more skill the worker must add to succeed in their career. Forcing them to spin on the hamster wheel will eventually just push them all to lie flat.
What we need is a complete overhaul of how we work. Capitalism — both the free market one, like the United States, and the state-sanctioned one, like China — is no longer painting a rosy picture and the idea of spending our best years enslaved to giant corporations whose billionaire bosses are just adding to their own coffers is fast losing traction.
The Covid-19 pandemic has already given everyone a taste of lying flat. If we want humanity to progress sustainably, we’d have to dig deep into the very idea of why we work. If we give up the 'need' to own a house or a car, do we still need to work 12 hours a day? What does the world look like when we all collectively give up consuming?
What do you think of this concept of tang ping? Do leave a comment and let us know.
Until next week, take care!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
If you’d like to read our previous issues, you can access our archives here.
If you’re interested in learning more about how burn-out relates specifically to the millennials, here’s a good resource:
…and now what?
I do workshops on motivation. This one is usually the first one my clients select, demonstrating just how much they’re struggling to keep their employees motivated.
Be it in Tahiti or elsewhere, too many times people have told me: “I work to get paid and enjoy my life outside work,” desperately waiting for the weekend. On Friday you meet them, happy and cheerful, the following Monday, sad and depressed.
This comes from a choice. A society’ choice: we all collectively decided that work is so important that we should just take it as it is and have fun on our free time. Which raises the question Hira asked: why do we work?
Barry Schwartz raises this same question in this book, literally titled 'Why We Work'. One of the key lessons of his work is this: “We ‘design’ human nature by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design."
Burn-out, workplace depression, constant demotivation are not part of the workplace unless we design it this way. Which also means we can design it differently as long as we’re willing to.
When you think about it, the current office culture is a direct descendant of Fordism and Taylorism, words we hear so often in economics, business and even history classes. They are deeply rooted in our current system but these concepts are no more than two centuries old. At the scale of humanity, this is a fairly young concept.
Even someone like John Maynard Keynes was thinking back in 1930 that these ideas would vanish and people wouldn’t need to work that much anymore, anticipating a 15-hour work week in the near future. Unfortunately, a recent report revealed that bank analysts are working around 95 hours per week!
There were mixed reactions to this revelation. Some say that this is how you succeed while others believe this could hardly be called having a life —the split running mostly along generations lines… or personal ambitions. But ambitions towards what? When do you have time to enjoy a Lamborghini or a yacht if you work so much you die at 50 from a stroke?
The current work culture, even at a white-collar office job, is the heir of the factory world of the beginning of the 20th century. We’re now deep into the 21st. Should we continue to go on with that? Should we continue to wear ourselves out and the planet with us?
The pandemic got us thinking: what if (at least until everyone went back to the office and got super “busy” again). We stopped, we thought, we dropped, we resumed. We didn’t change.
So maybe millennials are lazy, but maybe they’re lying flat to pause and think. Something they didn’t have time to do at work. Maybe Gen Z are still so young that they’re just dreamers. But if you may say they are dreamers, they are not the only ones…
Yes, for decades, wealth, well being, world peace and other great things came out of this economic system. And changing it towards something different is scary, uncertain, more of a bet than anything else. Unless we ask the right questions first. Unless we take the time to imagine and, right after, to act, for a world that fits what people need, not what they have to.
Hume was saying: “You cannot define an ought from an is”. So let’s all think about our ought, even if it IS not what’s happening now. Then maybe then, the Chinese millennials and others like them around the world, and those to come after, will lay flat and won’t need my help to understand what true motivation is.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury