Every few months, social media decides young people have given up. The story goes: they think hard work doesn't pay off anymore, so they're dropping out of the competition.
China has "lying flat" (tang ping). English speakers have quiet quitting. Japan has gone through the "shirake" and "satori" generations. Then the hot takes pile on: it's a silent strike against a rigged system, it's learned helplessness, the country is doomed.
It sounds brand new.
History says otherwise, and it's a lot funnier.
People have been arguing about this since ancient times.
Alongside the people asking whether chasing money, status and work is really worth it, there have always been older folks saying the young are lazy, impulsive, soft, selfish or have no drive.
So what is actually new today, and what is just an old argument with a new hashtag?
1. Opting out didn't start in the 1950s
Here is a rough timeline. Once you line it up, the repetition is hard to miss.
| Period | Movement or idea | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Around the 5th century BCE | Indian renouncer traditions | Leaving home, property and family and ritual duties to seek liberation became an established way of life. Buddhism and Jainism grew out of this world.[1] |
| 4th century BCE | Cynics and Diogenes | Brushed off social convention, money, possessions and status, and chose a plain life in line with nature.[2] |
| 4th–3rd centuries BCE | Epicureanism | Sorted desires into necessary ones and empty ones, and argued that endless wealth and fame never make you feel secure.[3] |
| 4th century BCE | Aristotle on young people | Described the young as passionate, impulsive, extreme and likely to think they know everything.[4] |
| 1854 | Thoreau's Walden | Asked whether spending your whole life chasing material wealth makes sense, and tried out simple living himself.[5] |
| 1883 | Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy | Attacked the idea that work itself is sacred and criticized long working hours.[6] |
| 1936 | Richard Gregg, Voluntary Simplicity | Put a name on the idea of owning and wanting less so you can put your energy into what matters.[7] |
| 1940s–50s | Beat Generation | Turned away from postwar American conformity, materialism and consumer culture.[8] |
| 1960s–70s | Hippies and the counterculture | Rejected authority and the standard life script, and spread communal living and alternative culture to the masses.[9] |
| 1960s–70s Japan | Sanmu-shugi and the shirake generation | Young people were called apathetic, indifferent and irresponsible. The label caught on around 1970.[10] |
| From 1971 | Postmaterialism | Researchers argued that people raised with more economic and physical security could care more about self-expression and quality of life.[11] |
| From the 1990s | Downshifting | Studied people who took less pay and fewer hours to get more free time and a better life.[12] |
| From 2021 | China's tang ping | Spread with several meanings at once: stepping back from brutal competition and overwork, coping, wanting less, and quiet protest.[13] |
| From 2022 | Quiet quitting | Went viral as a label for doing your job but not going above and beyond.[14] |
So the 1950s weren't the start.
They were the moment an old question, "Do I really have to chase more money, more stuff and a bigger career?", became very visible thanks to mass youth culture.
2. Calling all of it "laziness" gets the history wrong
Religious renunciation is not the same as dodging work. Ancient ascetics often trained under harsh discipline. The Cynics also demanded training and self-control.
Epicurus wasn't telling people to party nonstop. Almost the opposite: he told them to separate the needs you can actually satisfy from the empty wish for unlimited wealth or fame.[3]
Lafargue's case against work was a critique of politics and the economy.[6]
Voluntary simplicity and downshifting are closer to this choice: when you already have a decent base to live on, you pick time and quality of life over maximum income.[7][12]
Learned helplessness is yet another thing. It's a line of psychology research on what happens after painful experiences you can't control: passivity, fear and impaired responses. It is not a label for everyone who lives on less. Maier and Seligman's 2016 review also changed the classic theory a lot, based on new findings about the brain and about control.[15]
From the outside, all of these look like "not trying."
Underneath, the reasons are completely different.
3. Still, the postwar era was a turning point because more people could actually opt out
So why did this topic get so loud after the 1950s?
One major explanation is Ronald Inglehart's theory of postmaterialism.[11]
For most of history, work wasn't a philosophical choice. It was how you survived.
If food, housing, medicine and safety aren't guaranteed, finding yourself comes second to getting through the week.
After the war, economic growth and the welfare state gave a lot of people in rich countries something unusual. They grew up taking basic material and physical security for granted.
Inglehart argued that this can shift priorities away from money and safety toward belonging, self-expression and quality of life.[11]
The ideas were ancient.
What changed was how many people could afford to act on them.
4. Today's opting out comes from two opposite directions
Two very different routes can end in the same behavior.
The first comes from having enough:
"I already have enough."
If you don't care about more clothes, a bigger car, a fancier home or constant shopping, extra income stops being worth much very quickly.
The second comes from bad returns:
"The extra effort isn't worth what I get for it."
When wages, rent, promotions, job security or long hours mean extra effort barely pays, doing less can look sensible rather than sick.
One route says "I don't need more."
The other says "this deal is terrible."
Both can lead to the same thing: not joining the extra competition.
That's why "lying flat" can't be summed up as enlightenment or as helplessness. A 2026 PLOS ONE scoping review describes tang ping as something that depends on context and is read in different ways: disengagement, coping and resistance.[13]
5. Complaining about "young people today" is ancient too
This is where history turns into a comedy sketch.
In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle described the young as passionate, impulsive, extreme and overconfident.[4]
More than 2,000 years later, a 2019 Science Advances paper tested what the authors called the "kids these days" effect.[16]
Across five preregistered studies with 3,458 US adults, people were most likely to say that today's youth are getting worse at the very traits they themselves scored high on.
Heavy readers were more likely to say young people don't read.
People who value authority were more likely to say young people don't respect their elders.
The researchers also found that a memory bias feeds the illusion: people project who they are now onto their memory of the past.[16]
None of this means every generation is the same.
Housing, pay, education, starting a family, technology and the job market really do change.
What deserves suspicion is the claim, repeated again and again, that this time the young themselves have gone downhill.
6. And no, this doesn't mean we want to live like the 1940s
Living simply is not the same as missing a time of hardship.
Old kitchens and household tools are fun to look at in a museum.
Using them every day is a different story.
In postwar Japan, the washing machine, refrigerator and black-and-white TV were nicknamed the "three sacred treasures." A National Diet Library exhibition says that around 1953 was called the first year of household electrification. It also keeps a 1949 washing machine ad promising to cut 2 hours of hand-washing a day down to about 30 minutes.[17]
Progress didn't just pile up more stuff.
It cut an enormous amount of housework, physical strain, hassle and time spent looking things up.
So the question about simple living today isn't "should we go back to 1940?"
It's this:
If technology gave us back time, do we have to sell every saved hour straight back to our employer?
That is a very different argument.
7. "If everyone opts out, society stops" is true, and that's the interesting part
Society runs on necessary work: food, power, water, delivery, medicine, care, cleaning, manufacturing, maintenance and education.
If everyone refused to work on the same day, things would fall apart fast.
It looks like a public-goods or free-rider problem. Everyone benefits from a working system, even if they don't personally do every job it takes.
But that doesn't automatically give each person a reason to push as hard as possible.
The more useful question is:
What pay, freedom, respect and safety would make people choose to do the necessary work?
And when technology makes us more productive, should all of the gain go into making more, or can some of it become shorter working hours?
"Everyone just work harder" is easy to say.
People have been saying it for a very long time.
8. Rants about lazy youth work better as research prompts than as opinions
Someone posts that young people have stopped trying.
Ask one question: "Is this actually new?"
You find the Beats.
Then the hippies.
Then Japan's shirake generation.
Then Thoreau.
Then The Right to Be Lazy.
Then Epicurus.
Then Diogenes.
And at the end there's Aristotle, already complaining about young people's temperament back in the 4th century BCE.
You started with a social media fight and somehow ended up in ancient Greece.
That might be the best thing social media is good for.
Conclusion: for 2,500 years, people have argued between "work harder" and "what's all this work for?"
Today's young people didn't invent opting out.
Renunciation, Cynicism, Epicurean simplicity, Thoreau, anti-work writing, voluntary simplicity, the Beats, the hippies, shirake, downshifting, tang ping and quiet quitting are not the same thing.
But one question keeps coming back underneath them:
Is piling up money, status, possessions and work really what life is for?
Society answers:
If everyone steps back, who keeps things running?
The older generation adds:
Kids these days...
Then the next generation shows up.
Conditions change. Technology changes. Families change. Economies change.
The argument stays.
Humans have been having this fight for a very long time.
Maybe that's the funniest part.
References (17)
- 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
