内卷

Imagine everyone in your office starts staying until midnight — not because there's more work, but because leaving on time now looks lazy. That's 内卷: a vicious cycle where competition intensifies without any actual increase in reward or progress. It's the feeling of running faster and faster on a treadmill that's going nowhere. Chinese Gen-Z use it to describe grinding through school or work in a system so saturated that effort stops translating into advancement.

China's hyper-competitive education system (the gaokao) and a job market flooded with graduates created a pressure cooker where zero-sum thinking took over. When top universities admit the same number of students but applicants multiply, everyone works harder just to stay in place. The term was popularized online in 2020, partly through a viral photo of a Peking University student doing homework on a bicycle while riding to class.

指在竞争饱和的环境中，人们被迫不断内耗、低效努力却看不到出路的社会现象。