“What if the harder you work, the worse things become?” asks a March 2023 YouTube video essay by aini entitled “Extreme competition and the dark side of success in China”. “Competition in China is reaching a level so extreme that no matter how hard you work, the rewards stay the same – but if you can’t keep up, you drop to the very bottom. Why did this happen? And what happens, when people start to give up? How far can you push someone before they break?”

In China, after tiger parenting and grueling academic competition, students face the prospects of the “996” work week – namely working 12 hours from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, resulting in despair about the situation known as “”involution,” “the experience of being locked into a competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless” where workers compete so fiercely that the level of competition rises inexorably higher to ever more untenable levels to the detriment of the whole.

I was going to continue writing about WCIYP 2022, but the exercises will require more time to do and her video reminded me so much of what I want to avoid. What I heard about working at a big law firm was that it was “a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie”. So you’d better like eating pie.

The corporate way is well-established and the standards are clear. But if even if you like eating pie, you might fall off the treadmill anyway for some reason outside your control, and so what then? That’s what I guess this blog is going to describe. To be continued lol.