You're trapped on a conveyor belt of constant competition. Every test score, career milestone, and social expectation feels like a life-or-death hurdle. Suddenly, an elite academic comes along and says the whole system is rigged and exhausting. That's why young people in China are fangirling over Professor Biao Xiang, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute and formerly of Oxford University, who actually gets their crippling anxiety.
If you look at Gen Z and millennial burnout in urban centers like Beijing or Shanghai, you see millions of young people caught in neijuan—what economists and sociologists call "involution." It's the hamster wheel where everyone runs faster and faster, yet nobody moves forward. Mainstream media loves to slap labels on them like "lying flat" or "letting it rot," but those catchphrases miss the deep psychological exhaustion underneath. Biao Xiang doesn't scold youth for checking out. He explains why they feel this way, offering a diagnostic language for modern alienation that resonates deeply.
The Appeal of the Academic Rock Star
Why does an anthropologist who writes dense academic texts become an internet darling? Because he refuses to hand out generic motivational advice. When you're told for the thousandth time to just work harder or stay positive, it feels insulting.
Biao Xiang takes a different route. He talks about the "step-locked" life path. Young people follow rigid tracks through school and early jobs because they're terrified that a single misstep will ruin their future. They are over-credentialed and under-fulfilled. Xiang points out that society demands endless self-optimization while stripping away immediate, meaningful human connections.
He introduces the concept of "the nearby"—urging people to stop obsessing over abstract, macro-level pressures and start rebuilding local, tangible interactions with the people right in front of them. It's practical counter-programming against an atomized digital world.
Moving Past the Burnout Trap
If you're dealing with your own version of career or academic panic, borrowing a page from Xiang's playbook can change your daily perspective. Here is how you can apply these sociological insights right now:
- Audit your metrics of success. Ask yourself if you're chasing goals because you genuinely care about them or because you're terrified of falling behind peers on social media.
- Rebuild your immediate physical environment. Stop living entirely in virtual metrics, productivity trackers, and career ladders. Talk to your neighbors, cook with a friend, or walk without your phone.
- Recognize systemic pressure for what it is. When you fail to hit an arbitrary milestone, stop internalizing it as a moral failure. Sometimes the system is just broken.
Burnout won't vanish overnight just because an academic names it. But having someone with intellectual authority validate your exhaustion changes everything. It turns a private, shameful secret into a shared reality.
