“What to Read Now” pieces provide a brief dive beneath headlines into a current issue or challenge on the global scene, through the lens of Christian faith.

As the U.S. and China ramp up global competition, many millennials seem to be growing weary of the endless race for achievement. A New Yorker article on burnout as the new condition quotes the 2020 book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation that, “increasingly among [U.S.] millennials… burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.” In China, a 2020 video went viral of a university student riding his bike at night while working on a laptop perched on the handlebars. Public reaction described a new condition and one of the most commonly used Chinese words of 2020 – involution (see “China’s ‘Involuted’ Generation”) – described by one Chinese anthropologist as “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless” and becomes an “endless cycle of self-flagellation.” Despite prosperity in nearby South Korea, young people there are known as the “seven-give-up generation,” believing they will never find love, marriage, childbirth, human relations, homeownership, personal dreams and hope. In his 2015 book, the Korean-born, Germany-based philosopher Byung-Chan Han calls the burnout society the “signature affliction” of this age. One sign of resistance from young Chinese feeling beat up by society: a new “tang ping” or “lying flat” trend of not overworking and being content with more attainable achievements, which has met governmental opposition in the drive for self-reliant, global advancement. One reviewer writes that philosopher Han provides another alternative, “the God of the Sabbath – the holy day on which we are invited not to achieve, not to produce, but to stop. It’s a day not to. It’s an interval in which uselessness and idleness are celebrated. We can be tired on the Sabbath, a tiredness that Han concludes is a blessing because yielding to it precipitates peace and calm.” 

This is adapted from the July 2021 issue of Global Briefing, a resource of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) United Nations Office, where Chris Rice serves as director.