Social media periodically discovers a supposedly new crisis: young people have realized that hard work does not pay, so they are leaving the competition.
China has “lying flat.” The English-speaking world has quiet quitting. Japan has cycled through labels such as the shirake and satori generations. Then come the interpretations: a silent strike against exploitation, learned helplessness, social collapse.
It sounds unprecedented.
History makes it much funnier.
Humans have been arguing about versions of this problem since antiquity.
And alongside the people asking whether wealth, status and work are worth maximizing, older generations have repeatedly complained that the young are lazy, impulsive, soft, selfish or unmotivated.
What is genuinely new, then, and what is simply an old argument wearing a new hashtag?
1. Opting out did not begin in the 1950s
A rough historical timeline makes the repetition visible.
| Period | Movement or idea | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Around the 5th century BCE | Indian renouncer traditions | Institutionalized leaving household roles, property and ritual obligations in pursuit of liberation; Buddhism and Jainism emerged in this wider renouncer environment.[1] |
| 4th century BCE | Cynics and Diogenes | Rejected convention, wealth, possessions and status in favor of a radically simple life according to nature.[2] |
| 4th–3rd centuries BCE | Epicureanism | Distinguished necessary desires from empty ones and argued that limitless wealth and fame do not produce security.[3] |
| 4th century BCE | Aristotle on youth | Described young people as passionate, impulsive, excessive and prone to thinking they know everything.[4] |
| 1854 | Thoreau’s Walden | Questioned spending a lifetime pursuing material wealth and experimented with deliberate simple living.[5] |
| 1883 | Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy | Attacked the moral glorification of labor and criticized excessive working hours.[6] |
| 1936 | Richard Gregg, Voluntary Simplicity | Gave a modern name to intentionally reducing possessions and desires to focus energy on what matters.[7] |
| 1940s–50s | Beat Generation | Distanced itself from postwar conformity, materialism and consumer culture.[8] |
| 1960s–70s | Hippies and the counterculture | Rejected conventional authority and standardized life paths on a mass cultural scale.[9] |
| 1960s–70s Japan | Sanmu-shugi and the shirake generation | Young people were labeled apathetic, indifferent and irresponsible; the term became common around 1970.[10] |
| From 1971 | Postmaterialism | Research argued that cohorts raised with greater economic and physical security could prioritize self-expression and quality of life over material security.[11] |
| From the 1990s | Downshifting | Voluntarily reducing working hours and income to gain time or quality of life became a research topic.[12] |
| From 2021 | China’s tang ping | Spread as a multidimensional response to intense competition and overwork: disengagement, coping, low desire and resistance.[13] |
| From 2022 | Quiet quitting | A viral label for limiting effort to the job rather than continually going above and beyond.[14] |
The 1950s were not the beginning.
They were a moment when a very old question—whether one must maximize wealth, possessions and conventional success—became highly visible through mass youth culture.
2. But these are not all the same thing called “laziness”
Religious renunciation is not the same as avoiding work. Ancient ascetics often practiced severe discipline. Cynicism also demanded training and self-control.
Epicurus was not preaching endless indulgence. His point was almost the reverse: distinguish needs that can actually be satisfied from empty desires for unlimited wealth or fame.[3]
Lafargue’s anti-work argument was a political-economic critique.[6]
Voluntary simplicity and downshifting are closer to choosing time or quality of life over income maximization when a sufficient material base exists.[7][12]
Learned helplessness is different again. It is a psychological research tradition concerning uncontrollable aversive events and subsequent passivity, fear and impaired responding. It is not a diagnosis for everyone who chooses a low-consumption life. Maier and Seligman’s 2016 review also substantially revised the classic theory in light of neuroscience and controllability research.[15]
From the outside, all of these may look like “not trying.”
Their mechanisms are completely different.
3. The postwar era still mattered because more people could realistically opt out
Why did the issue become so visible after the 1950s?
Ronald Inglehart’s theory of postmaterialism offers one important explanation.[11]
For most of history, work was not primarily a philosophical question. It was a survival requirement.
When food, shelter, medicine and safety are insecure, self-expression comes after staying alive.
Postwar economic growth and the welfare state gave larger populations in advanced industrial societies something historically unusual: cohorts who could grow up treating basic material and physical security as relatively normal.
Inglehart argued that this could shift priorities from economic and physical security toward belonging, self-expression and quality of life.[11]
The philosophy was ancient.
What changed was the number of people who could afford to act on it.
4. Modern opting out arrives through two opposite routes
Today, two routes can lead to the same behavior.
The first comes from abundance:
“I already have enough.”
If someone does not strongly value more clothes, a larger car, more expensive housing or constant consumption, the marginal value of additional income falls quickly.
The second route comes from poor returns:
“The extra effort is not worth what it buys.”
If wages, housing costs, promotion systems, job insecurity or long hours make additional effort yield little, reducing effort can look rational rather than pathological.
One route says “I do not need more.”
The other says “the exchange rate is terrible.”
Both may end in the same action: refusing additional competition.
That is why “lying flat” cannot be reduced to enlightenment or helplessness. A 2026 PLOS ONE scoping review describes tang ping as a context-dependent phenomenon variously interpreted as disengagement, coping and resistance.[13]
5. The complaint that “young people today” are declining is also ancient
This is where human history becomes comedy.
In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle described youth as passionate, impulsive, excessive and prone to confident certainty.[4]
More than two millennia later, a 2019 Science Advances paper experimentally studied what the authors called the “kids these days” effect.[16]
Across five preregistered studies involving 3,458 U.S. adults, people were especially likely to believe that today’s youth were declining on traits at which they themselves scored highly.
People who read a lot were more likely to think young people do not read.
People who valued authority were more likely to think young people do not respect elders.
The work also found evidence that memory bias helps create the illusion: people project aspects of their present selves onto their memory of the past.[16]
None of this means generations are identical.
Housing, wages, education, family formation, technology and labor markets genuinely change.
The suspiciously repetitive part is the claim that this time the youth themselves have fundamentally deteriorated.
6. None of this means we should return to life in the 1940s
Simple living should not be confused with nostalgia for material hardship.
Old kitchens and household tools are fascinating in museums.
Living with them every day is another question.
In postwar Japan, washing machines, refrigerators and black-and-white televisions became famous as the “three sacred treasures.” A National Diet Library exhibition notes that around 1953 was called the beginning of the household electrification era, and preserves a 1949 washing-machine advertisement claiming to cut two hours of daily hand-washing to about 30 minutes.[17]
Technological progress did not merely create more stuff.
It eliminated enormous amounts of household labor, physical strain, inconvenience and information cost.
The modern simplicity question is therefore not “Should we go back to 1940?”
It is:
If technology saved us time, must every saved hour be sold back to the labor market?
That is a very different argument.
7. “If everyone opts out, society stops” is true—and that is the interesting problem
Society contains necessary labor: food, power, water, logistics, medicine, care, sanitation, manufacturing, maintenance and education.
If everybody simultaneously refuses to work, things break quickly.
This resembles a public-goods and free-rider problem. Individuals benefit from a functioning system even when they do not personally provide every contribution it requires.
But that does not automatically create a reason for every individual to maximize effort.
The more useful question is:
What pay, autonomy, dignity and safety make necessary work worth voluntarily doing?
And when technology raises productivity, should every gain become more output, or can part of it become shorter working time?
“Everyone should work harder” is easy to say.
Humans have been saying versions of it for a very long time.
8. Youth-bashing posts are more useful as research generators than as opinions
A post says the young have stopped trying.
Ask one question: “Is this actually new?”
You find the Beats.
Then hippies.
Then Japan’s shirake generation.
Then Thoreau.
Then The Right to Be Lazy.
Then Epicurus.
Then Diogenes.
Finally Aristotle appears, already complaining about the temperament of youth in the fourth century BCE.
You started with a social-media argument and somehow ended up in ancient Greece.
That may be one of the better uses of social media.
Conclusion: humans have spent 2,500 years debating “work harder” versus “what is all that work for?”
Modern young people did not invent opting out.
Renunciation, Cynicism, Epicurean simplicity, Thoreau, anti-work critique, voluntary simplicity, the Beats, hippies, shirake, downshifting, tang ping and quiet quitting are not identical.
But a recurring question sits underneath them:
Is maximizing wealth, status, possessions and work really the purpose of life?
Society answers:
If everyone steps back, who keeps everything running?
Older generations add:
Kids these days…
Then another generation arrives.
Conditions change. Technology changes. Families change. Economies change.
The argument survives.
Humanity has been having this fight for a remarkably long time.
That may be the funniest part.
Sources
- Sue Hamilton, “Renouncing the Household: The Buddha's Middle Way,” Oxford Academic, 2001
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Ancient Ethical Theory,” Cynics section
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Epicurus.
- Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 12, Perseus Digital Library
- Library of Congress, “Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).
- Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, 1883
- Richard B. Gregg, The Value of Voluntary Simplicity, Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 3, 1936
- JSTOR, “Unfettered personal expression in the 1950s: the Beat Generation and the Abstract Expressionists,” plus related Beat scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “1960s counterculture”; HISTORY, “How the Vietnam War Empowered the Hippie Movement.
- Digital Daijisen and Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, entry “Sanmu-shugi,” via Kotobank
- Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe,” American Political Science Review 65(4), 1971, 991–1017; later economic-security tests
- Emily Huddart Kennedy et al., Sociological Forum 28(4), 2013; Ruth Lane et al., Geoforum 114, 2020
- A scoping review of ‘Tang ping’ (Lying flat) and mental health status among Chinese youth,” PLOS ONE, 2026
- Gallup, “Is Quiet Quitting Real?”, 2022/2023
- Steven F. Maier & Martin E. P. Seligman, Psychological Review 123(4), 2016, DOI: 10.1037/rev0000033
- John Protzko & Jonathan W. Schooler, Science Advances 5(10), 2019, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav5916
- National Diet Library, Japan, exhibition material on postwar washing machines and household electrification
