Take a nap but don't "lie flat"

I sort of get it. What’s the point of working extremely hard if you will only be making small,

incremental increases in your quality of life? Why not just do as little as possible to get by, relax, hang out, and enjoy yourself? Hong Kong is very materialistic anyhow. What matters most is relishing the simple aspects of life.

Yet, it is a very pessimistic mindset to have, to not want to strive to improve your situation, especially for young people. To me, it’s a sign that Gen Zs are “stressed and depressed”, and it shouldn’t be like that. I hope we can change that mindset.

“Lying flat” (or  躺平 tang ping in Chinese) is the concept that originated in China of people doing the bare minimum to live and abandoning the social and other pressures that much of Asia is known for. Pressures include the highly competitive education system and increasingly competitive job market. People who lie flat are mostly from Gen Z - my generation. They don’t give in to the hamster-wheel culture of working 24/7. They view this culture as toxic. In my own life, I sometimes feel that I’m trying to do well in school just so I can get accepted to a good college where I will work even harder, so that I can get a high-paying job where I will also work extremely hard, just to get ahead. I’m not focused on material gains, so it does feel somewhat pointless. But I understand that at some point, you need to at least be able to buy an airplane ticket, a place to live, and have goals.

In Hong Kong, I see a big part of the reason youth decides to lie flat is because salaries are relatively low as compared the cost to buy an apartment. To put it in perspective, a person earning the current Hong Kong minimum wage would have to work about six years, by my calculation, to afford the down payment on a 400 square foot apartment, roughly speaking. That assumes the person uses their entire salary for housing, which is not realistic. According to Oxfam Hong Kong, the median monthly income for Hong Kong’s bottom 10% of households dropped 23% from before Covid, while the median monthly income rose 6.3% for the top 10%. All over the world after the pandemic, the top 10% of the population earns about 15-30x more than the bottom 50%. I could show a lot more statistics, but you get the point.

All of this is making us Gen Zs feel gloomy and depressed about the future. Almost every day I read about a looming mental health crisis in Hong Kong and elsewhere among Zoomers following Covid restrictions, declining economic growth and job prospects, a growing gap between rich and poor, climate concerns, and seeing their parents tired from having to work all the time.

While I don’t have any answers as to how to change the mindset of Zoomers who are lying flat, I think schools, employers, governments, families, and friends should keep in mind the current outlook that exists in the world today. If every person made an effort to help someone they know who is having a hard time coping with life, by offering to counsel or mentor them, provide an internship or job, give workers time to pursue outside interests, improve working conditions, etc, I think it would help some people to change their mindset and start wanting to get more out of life than just lying flat. Take a nap but don’t lie flat.