The hilarious part is how the Chinese Communist Party's official propagandists and elite Chinese academics are using their bully pulpits to explicitly shame anyone who contemplates giving up on the rat race.
Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns.
To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.
It's my perception that those op-eds are very much in the contrarian minority, a far cry from being the central position of the media institution. They're roundly and immediately mocked, and the majority of coverage in mainstream newspapers is much more sympathetic to the antiwork extreme than the bootstraps one.
Yeah, if anything, US is the mirror image, where all prestige media is filled with complaints about how bad The System sucks and how it is the cause of every hapless individual's inevitable burnout and despair.
In Canada, the op-ed pages at the start of the pandemic were full of articles about how CERB (benefits for those laid off due to COVID) was being exploited by work-shy layabouts.
Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns.
To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.