Even more frightening than class solidification is the beginning of downward mobility of society.
In 1993, then-US President Bill Clinton said in a speech shortly after his inauguration: "When today's children reach adulthood, they will be the first generation in history to live below their parents." ”
Clinton's remarks were intended to arouse people's sense of crisis and further explain his long-term strategy for economic development.
Today's U.S. economy is still developing steadily, but on the other side of the ocean, our social landscape has undergone earth-shaking changes, although there is no such "degenerate" generation of American hippies, but in different cultural backgrounds, today's young people have their own ways of "degenerating".
When society is involuted and competition intensifies, there is more and more space for young people to escape, demand begins to appear, and market supply also comes into being.
In Suzhou, a youth nursing home is ready to open in early July, and although it is only 500 yuan a week for publicity, although it has not yet opened, hundreds of tenants in the group are already waiting in line to check in.
From the point of view of economics, people are forward-looking and will plan ahead, but now more and more young people are beginning to pay attention to the present and seem to ignore the future life, which in itself can explain a big problem.
The emergence of youth nursing homes provides a place for young people to escape from life or relieve work pressure for a short time, which is very in line with the "solution" that young people want to live in today.
It's more like a paradise.
The threshold for setting up a youth nursing home is low, but if you want to continue to operate, you need to rely on it. The most attractive part of the youth nursing home is to screen the age, personality traits, occupations and other categories of the residents, and then gather these young people together at the same frequency through these labels, interact in the same space, enjoy nature, and create a group exchange culture with the same frequency but diversity.
Some youth nursing homes also have a high threshold and do not accept people over the age of 45, looking more like a place of escape for the unemployed, a holy place to lie down and rot.
Judging from the name, young people want to provide for the elderly, which seems to be a way back, a negative and pessimistic attitude towards life, and it is not worth advocating.
But from a social point of view, this is more like a replica of Japan's low-desire society.
People are born with desires, especially in a modern business society full of material temptations, but for young people in an economy, if the pressure is too high, or even the path to achieve the goal of life is far away, after the struggle fails, they will naturally run away.
And from the perspective of the whole Asian region, the life pressure of young people in China is almost the greatest.
We have one of the highest house-price-to-income ratios in the world, and the cost of raising children is one of the highest in the world, but our per capita income is still in the middle of the pack.
In the context of low desire, a youth nursing home that focuses on healing the soul and escaping for a short time came into being.
Some youth nursing homes have a revenue and profit of nearly seven figures in just three months, and they have attracted tens of thousands of consultations before they even officially open.
In the face of doubts from the outside world, Lu Baike, the founder of the first youth nursing home in Yunnan as early as October 2022, believes that we should be optimistic about the outside world's doubts about the youth nursing home.
Lubock set up a youth hostel in 2014, with up to 10 years of experience in understanding the physical and mental needs of young people, when establishing a youth nursing home, Luberk is people-oriented, limited to 18-45 years old with work experience group to stay, and currently live mostly freelancers, or young people who encounter bottlenecks in work and life, and then start again after resting.
According to Lubberke, most people leave a youth nursing home with a change in mindset that allows them to perform better socially, academically or at work.
In the youth nursing home, people can freely participate in yoga, coffee, photography, cooking, tea art, chess and cards, red wine and other kinds of long, some also emphasize close to nature farm work, gardening, fishing activities, etc., the fee also varies according to the region and the content of the activity.
In Chengdu, 1,200 yuan a month can include food and accommodation; Hebei also has 3,588 yuan a month, and there is even a weekly billing.
There are pros and cons to everything, and the more popular the youth nursing home, the more profound the social reasons behind it.
The root cause of this is that the domestic workplace environment has deteriorated, employment has become more and more demanding or even unfriendly to young people, office workers have to work more shifts, personnel relations have become more complicated, and meaningless work has increased, so that young people are generally disappointed in the workplace and choose to escape.
Behind the explosion of youth nursing homes is the embodiment of the extreme involution in the workplace.
In the past few years, the expansion of colleges and universities has led to the depreciation of academic qualifications in colleges and universities, and the market has seen a large supply of graduates from the perspective of talent supply, but the job market has provided fewer new job opportunities, which ultimately leads to the employment trend of young people becoming more and more difficult, fierce competition and fewer opportunities, which is a very negative situation.
Today, perhaps everyone is beginning to think about the question: Will the income level of the generation born today start to decline?
Economic problems are essentially social problems.
Perhaps the most interesting scene today is that young people want to retire in retirement, while older people want to work.
Young people want to retire, on the one hand, the pressure in the workplace is increasing, and of course, more importantly, the burden on them is still lighter, and there is no particularly urgent responsibility to raise a family.
But for the elderly, many people in their sixties and seventies are still looking for work here and there, just to support their families, because they face heavy family responsibilities, do their part for the family, and at the same time reduce some of the financial burden for the young people as much as possible.
Two people of different ages have completely different choices, which may be due to the difference in perception caused by the difference in the times.
This generation of young people grew up in the market economy, deeply influenced by Western individualism, self-feeling is the first element, decision-making is not bound by social and family pressure, and the employment mentality is also as long as they don't like a job, they will resign naked or decisively resign to change jobs, which is the fundamental soil for the germination of youth nursing homes.
But for the older generation, they are still influenced by traditional Confucian culture, focusing more on group and family interests, and in the process they can even give up some of their own interests, emphasizing giving and giving.
The differences in values and ways of thinking of different generations may also determine the different choices we make to deal with the macroeconomy.
For the old people of that era, no matter how difficult it was on the macro level, they would have the courage to struggle and endure all the hardships and hardships, which was the background of their values.
But today's young people are no longer able to have that quality, and young people are more focused on self-perception and less likely to swallow their anger, which also means that once the macro economy is in uncertainty, young people will take advantage of the situation to "lie down", rather than relying on their own strength to reverse the cycle.
The economy is going to grow, but with a fundamental shift in the perception of a generation, it may not be possible for any of today's mainstream narratives to use the same approach as the emphasis on selflessness in the past.
Selfless devotion to collectivism, which in the past was a necessary quality for everyone, can intensify the impulse of young people to escape.
They may not really want to retire, nor do they really want to escape, but they do use their actions to make some kind of response, and this response, as time goes by, the persistence of involution may become bigger and bigger.
end.
Author: Luo sir, concerned about the economy, society and everything in our world, curious about the logic behind the development of things, optimistic pessimist.