Time's Tyranny: How Digital Labor Is Reshaping China's Youth
"Youth Are Not Resources": Senior Party Institution Leader Lian Si's Reflection on Restoring Dignity to China's Young Generation
For this week, I bring a long article about Chinese youth, which I already mentioned in an earlier episode discussing the "involution" phenomenon within Chinese academic circles. The article also from Professor Lian Si, the Vice Chair of China Youth University of Political Studies, titled The Tyranny of Time: An Examination of Youth Labor in the Mobile Internet Era. It was first published in China Youth Studies(中国青年研究), a journal led by the Communist Youth League of China.
The previous episode I presented focused on young academics; this one expands his analysis to include two additional vulnerable groups: food delivery riders alienated by the algorithmic management of digital platforms and software engineers in tech companies suffering under the toxic "996" work culture.
Lian criticizes a popular societal view that reduces youth to mere resources for extraction or vessels for future productivity. Calling institutions to "make time more tolerant and flexible" speaks to a broader need for societal transformation—one that values human potential beyond simplistic metrics of speed and output. Professor Lian further advocates for the country to reconsider its emphasis on "fast" values such as immediate results, achievement, competition, and efficiency and instead embrace more "slow" values, including relationships, community building, long-term vision, cooperation, patience, and leisure.
Introduction
Humans seek meaning of existence in time. Time has been an important philosophical topic throughout history, but only a few social sciences have deeply articulated time as a concept. In most social science research, time remains an absent variable—social sciences are generally considered "unrelated" to time. When we study a problem, we assume the subject is static; statistical data is typically fixed at a certain point, often neglecting the time factor though it still has effects. In a sense, everything humans do is to gain time for themselves; the entire history of human civilization is a history of time being alienated and time biting back at humanity itself.
In time sociology, age is a key element that society uses to define the time structure of life. It presents both the time sequence of life and gives normative qualities to life time, assigning different role expectations and social positions to people at different age stages. Consequently, people at different age stages have different time rhythms. For "youth" as a specific age stage, its most distinctive characteristic is being young—this seemingly tautological statement actually indicates the essential attribute of youth: seemingly inexhaustible time and the most vigorous physical and mental energy in one's life. When studying youth, we need to return to the overlooked primary issue—time—to gain a more comprehensive understanding.
Starting from time, we can find the key to understanding youth. This article uses time sociology as a research perspective to explore the real state of youth work in the mobile internet era and how time systems affect youth. In the mobile internet era, people can feel the world around them constantly accelerating. For young individuals, they can only actively keep up with or be swept into accelerated time. This accelerated concept of time is externalized as work systems, making youth work characterized by "fast rhythm," "multiple parallel tasks," "complex coordination," and "around-the-clock" features. Meanwhile, time increasingly shows its coercive nature, sometimes deviating to become shackles controlling young people's minds—which is what this article will discuss.
The data used in this article involves three social surveys in which the author participated, all conducted among employed youth under 35 in major cities. The "Food Delivery Rider Survey" was conducted in Beijing in 2019 with 1,692 valid questionnaires and 62 interviews; the "Internet Young Engineer Survey" was conducted in Shenzhen in 2020 with 505 valid questionnaires and 46 interviews; and the "Young University Teacher Survey" was conducted in Shanghai in 2021 with 1,031 questionnaires and 54 interviews. Although these surveys were conducted in different cities focusing on different groups, they all reflect how time shapes and disciplines youth from different aspects. Indeed, once we understand how institutions design time, we also know how society treats young people—not through promotional slogans written in books or PUA (Pick-up Artist, referring to psychologically manipulative behavior) soft articles showing concern and love, but through real existence against the backdrop of young people's real lives.
Forced Time — People Being Accelerated
In the mobile internet era, various logistics platforms regard speed as their core competitiveness. With the acceleration of smart retail implementation, minute-level instant delivery has become a new professional standard in the logistics industry. In the entire logistics system, delivery personnel (couriers, food delivery riders) serve as the "last mile" of the delivery process. The delay risks of all previous links are transferred and superimposed on them. If previous stages are delayed, the final stage must compensate to ensure the relative efficiency of the total process, so delivery pressure is concentrated on the last workers. For platforms, time means efficiency and market competitiveness; shorter time is the platform's promise to consumers and requirement for workers.
The perception of time is determined by life rhythm. Research has shown that personal time perception often depends on cellular metabolic rate. In certain scenarios, time loses accuracy, which is why sometimes we feel time flies, while other times it drags on. In delivery scenarios, why can ordinary minutes that we wouldn't normally notice drive riders to "race against time" and make consumers "anxiously impatient"? What mechanism makes this brief waiting seem so long and urgent? What causes this time perception difference is the "countdown."
Throughout human history, each step in the development of timing devices has influenced people's views of reality. The earliest clocks were not continuously running but were used as time announcers. Medieval monasteries rang clocks to remind monks to pray. Bell sounds were also common in medieval towns because towns had numerous commercial needs and technical processes that required coordination; timekeepers and the entire community needed to hear time signals. Clocks were initially located in visible central public places, such as cathedrals and bell towers. Later, clocks became smaller and more dispersed in more private personal spaces, such as offices, workshops, bedrooms, etc., and finally in clothing pockets and on wrists. With technological advancement, people developed a more universal time consciousness, and clocks became a necessary "prosthesis" for everyone. Paying attention to time and observing time became a basic disciplinary requirement.
The continuous innovation of production processes since industrialization—Taylorism, Fordism, post-Fordism—are essentially centered around effective time utilization. Efficiency-first ideology provides the intellectual impetus for continuously extracting time. Time is assigned value and measured in monetary form: time is money, becoming an object of careful arrangement and systematic calculation. Countless technological discoveries and man-made devices since the modern era are related to gaining or saving time, all aimed at overcoming "slowness" to increase speed. Iteration, replacement, and innovation are almost all companies' assessment indicators today.
With the further expansion of efficiency-first ideology, the "countdown" as a way of expressing time emerged. The brilliance of the countdown is that it separates a period of time from a forward time sequence and re-narrates it in reverse order. In this process, the continuous flow of time is presented as more intense fragments. In a countdown, time is no longer an unlimited possibility extending into the future, but an existence with boundaries and scope, a distance gradually approaching a target.
Just as objects have different presentations due to spatial proximity, different time approaches to a goal also present different forms. The countdown has a unique "flip structure." Facing the same goal, when using a forward count, time expands outward, and the goal converges toward the person; at this time, the person is the center, and as time passes, the goal gradually approaches the person. Recall sitting on a train—mountains and scenery in the window come toward "me," not "me" moving toward objects outside. When using a countdown, the relationship between objects and people is reversed: time converges inward, the goal becomes the center, and as time approaches, people actively move toward the goal. In other words, in a countdown, the subjectivity of the goal and the person is reversed; the person is thoroughly reduced to a tool for achieving the goal, and the person's structure in space is distorted. Therefore, for the same duration, using forward counting versus countdown counting gives completely different feelings.
The research team found that delivery platforms display a countdown mode on riders' ends, and when the deadline approaches, the system activates reminder and warning functions. One food delivery rider said: "After accepting an order, my whole state changes; time ticks away, every minute and second walks on the tip of my heart." In fact, psychological panic is a form of mental resistance to the gradual loss of subjectivity. When a person enters a countdown state, they feel increased pressure—time is watching you, the goal is urging you, something is chasing you. Workers completely ignore the external world (traffic rules cease to exist), forget themselves, and become flying machines. Before the rise of mobile internet platforms, people's immediate needs for food had never reached such an urgent degree.
In essence, the countdown's stringent requirements for delivery time are no different from Taylorism's refined calculation of labor time—both expect to improve efficiency through time management. The time sequence places workers in an assembly-line "production" order: accepting orders, picking up food, delivering, arriving. But unlike Taylorism controlling the labor process through forward time, platforms exert pressure on people to the extreme through "reverse time." Time is rapidly consumed, creating pressure sufficient to make workers generate more motivation to self-accelerate, even if this speed requirement has exceeded workers' ability to complete specified tasks.
We must admit that the countdown makes "speed" more prominent; speed becomes the standard for measuring everything and the basis for distribution legitimacy. Fast workers can receive more rewards (more orders), while slow ones receive punishment. These punishments include economic (reduced system dispatch orders), reputational (lower weekly rankings), and psychological (retraining). Fast versus slow has become a new distributive justice. One food delivery rider mentioned: "According to company regulations, delays result in deductions of over 50 yuan. If there are too many delay complaints, you'll receive a message about 'needing company training' or be summoned by the station leader." Clearly, the countdown subjects workers to a double blow, both material and spiritual. Economic loss, reputational humiliation, and cognitive brainwashing, combined with countdown institutional design, undoubtedly make time reveal a stronger disciplinary attribute. Time is no longer a necessary measure to ensure delivery but exhibits the repression and punishment of "tyranny." Of course, many more food delivery riders deliver within the time limit without punishment. On the surface, they seem to have won the battle with time, but as workers collectively, they have already lost the overall war with time.
Today, the countdown mechanism has infiltrated internet platforms such as ride-hailing, community group buying, fresh e-commerce, instant messaging, etc., and spread to other fields, gradually gaining discourse power over workers while bringing anxiety and panic to more social members. The countdown reflects not only a work mechanism but also a means of constructing behavior. Through psychological construction and behavioral training, it accelerates the transmission of the "cannot be delayed" concept, thoroughly "alienating" workers into slaves of time. Undoubtedly, the countdown improves time utilization efficiency but also pushes excessive time extraction toward the opposite of humanity.
The prevalence of countdowns is a manifestation of accelerated society. Mark Taylor said "speed kills," while Hartmut Rosa believed that "acceleration defines the dynamics, development, and change logic of modern society, as well as the driving force." Rosa further defined the essence of modern society as an "acceleration society," considering acceleration the cause of new alienation. The author believes that the generalization of countdowns is the latest manifestation of accelerationism's new alienation. While bringing us more convenience and more efficient collaboration, it also places us in "cages" woven by the utilitarianism of accelerated society. Today, we are in a high state of alertness about not falling behind, set by various countdowns (such as exam countdowns, work task countdowns, project countdowns, etc.), even if we can't see the existence of tangible countdown devices. More terrifyingly, once a countdown starts, acceleration itself accelerates. Everyone will unconsciously "race" while running desperately; time becomes increasingly insufficient. Just by taking a slight breath, you feel you're already behind. The countdown is like an overseer raising a whip, driving us to work busily, seizing every moment. At an age that should be freely pursuing dreams, young people are forced to chase various goals set by countdowns to avoid missing opportunities and valuable possibilities. The paradox is that in this rapidly changing society, no option can be proven in advance to be the most valuable in the future. Just as food delivery riders are called "hummingbirds" (the only bird that can "hover"), "hummingbirds" flap their wings hard to prevent themselves from falling, yet they don't know where they're flying to. Food delivery riders "float" between urban and rural areas and also "float" between institutional gaps. They don't have leisure time to accumulate enough knowledge and skills for the future, nor do they have time to argue with platforms about whether the last deduction was reasonable. All they can do is deliver the current order before the countdown expires. They are full of regret for the past and fear for the future, and only by desperately consuming the present moment can they confirm they haven't wasted time.
Intrusive Time — People Being Emptied
In March 2019, some internet companies implemented the "996" work system (working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, violating current labor protection laws), attracting high social attention and becoming the largest-scale labor-management relationship discussion in Chinese internet history and the first large-scale network social movement involving "white-collar" and highly educated youth groups. Subsequently, discussions about prevalent overtime in the internet industry intensified. On December 31, 2020, the topic "How to view 'Kuaishou' implementing big/small week schedule for all employees starting January 10, 2021?" appeared on the popular Zhihu platform. Zhihu is a network platform gathering highly educated professional youth, and users continuously criticized and questioned the big/small week work system. Just four days later, news of a "22-year-old female Pinduoduo employee dying suddenly on her way home after working overnight" pushed the entire social public opinion criticism to a climax.
In the internet industry, "996" is almost an "explicit rule." The research team's "programmer" survey showed that 98.81% of respondents had overtime experience, with 9.70% always working overtime, 37.82% frequently working overtime, 40.99% sometimes working overtime, and only 10.30% rarely working overtime and 1.19% never working overtime. Regarding daily working hours, 81.59% worked 8-10 hours, 15.45% worked over 10 hours, and only 2.96% worked less than 8 hours as stipulated by labor law. One respondent stated, "If one day I don't work overtime, it feels abnormal." Of course, overtime itself doesn't constitute an infringement of workers' rights, but not paying for overtime violates relevant laws. The survey showed that only 15.83% of respondents indicated they "sometimes" received overtime pay, and 30.06% said they received overtime pay "every time"—together less than half of the survey sample.
Why do internet companies dare to blatantly disregard workers' legal rights? The key lies in how "overtime" is defined. When "overtime" doesn't exist, there's no question of paying for it. Unlike the public's understanding of overtime, overtime behavior in internet companies has strong concealment and deception because it doesn't all occur in physical workplace spaces.
In the industrial era, spatial boundaries constituted the distinction between being on duty and off duty, also distinguishing between public and private time. Time division accompanied spatial transition. Whether in sugarcane fields or on assembly lines, work required a certain physical space; workers had to gather in a specific space for labor relations to occur. Within labor spaces, individuals' involvement in occupational roles was limited by the time boundaries they "sold"; outside labor spaces, individuals had the right to refuse relationships with occupational roles and to refuse to identify with those roles. The promises and responsibilities contained in occupational roles were limited to labor spaces; individuals did not want to complete work tasks beyond labor spaces. Spatial boundaries were used to distinguish between occupational roles and personal life. Outside labor spaces, people could reasonably shed their occupational roles and return to other roles, such as children, parents, spouses, friends, etc. People's social world was clearly divided into private time (life time) and public time (labor time). During life time, people didn't need to carry work notes and content, telling colleagues where to find them. They could rest assured that once they left the labor space, their privacy was protected.
In the mobile internet era, smart mobile devices can be used for both leisure and office functions. Their powerful connectivity, interoperability, and portability have broken the usage distinction between work and non-work situations, becoming a powerful tool for boundary integration. As a "pager" that can access work networks at any time, mobile devices on one hand greatly promote work extensibility, and on the other hand bring workers a large amount of invisible working time. Workers are increasingly unrestrained by time and space, and the boundaries between labor time and private time are increasingly blurred. Because workers can be found and awakened promptly, individuals have no completely private time and undisturbed periods. Imagine, a person might be caring for the elderly, raising children, accompanying friends, but once a mobile device calls them, they must immediately detach from their current role (child, parent, friend) and switch to their professional role. Even if the body is immersed in a space at the moment, the spirit can escape from that place. An important feature of the mobile internet era is spatial dispersion. Now, specific physical space is no longer required for certain work. The functional meaning that space originally possessed has disappeared. Home, restaurants, cinemas, sports fields... places that originally had their own functions all become workspaces. Work mobility has increased; people flow through different spaces, but the essence of work remains unchanged.
In the industrial era, the distinction between private and work time was clear, and the resulting social relationships were explicit. A person's identity transition was defined spatially, in a rigid, cyclical way. In the mobile internet era, the private and public spheres overlap to some extent. The conflicts between various social roles played by individuals are increasingly intense, and various social relationships are also increasingly tense. The sense of oppression from modernization is strengthening. One "programmer" said in an in-depth interview: "About daily working hours, how to put it... basically as long as your eyes are open, you're working. We don't distinguish between work and off hours. When a superior contacts you, you must respond. You can't use 'off work' as an excuse not to reply to WeChat or DingTalk. Not responding to work arrangements means you won't have performance opportunities in the future."
When we questioned this extended standby work mode during research, companies often retorted: "This isn't overtime; it's flexible working hours." This rhetoric actually misappropriates the concept of "flexible working hours." Flexible working hours refer to giving flexibility in adjusting work time structure boundaries based on standard working hours. This system originated in German enterprises in the 1960s, originally intended for "staggered work hours" due to traffic congestion. Internet companies borrow so-called "flexible working hours" to disguise and package their excessive work systems, hoping workers can enter work states anytime, anywhere, unrestricted by space and time. This isn't "flexible arrangement" considering workers but beautified "forced intrusion." The author uses the term "intrusive time" to highlight labor time's violation and erosion of private time. This "quiet" forcible entry means the complete disappearance of free time—formally, the body is free, but workers haven't gained true freedom.
Some scholars believe that with scientific and technological development, human labor time will become shorter while private time will continuously extend, providing increasingly sufficient objective conditions for human freedom. Some even more optimistically foresee that the shortening of socially necessary labor time brought by technological development is inevitably linked to the increase in workers' free time, greatly enhancing human creativity. But reality has dealt this judgment a heavy blow. High technology brings not more free time but more strict real-time reply status indicators (such as the DingTalk app displaying "read" or "unread" for message recipients). "Programmers" are typical representatives of highly educated youth, but now, overtime has become their common labor state. "Knowledge workers" from the industrial era, who had a certain degree of freedom and autonomy, have degenerated into "response machines" available around the clock in the mobile internet era. In the handicraft era, people used tools; in the industrial era, machines controlled people; in the mobile internet era, people lived in algorithms. Technological development brings neither full human freedom nor improved worker status. On the contrary, capital's control over workers, if not comprehensively strengthened, has at least secretly unfolded through more hidden technical means—this is the essence of power relations in the production field of the mobile internet era.
When people work everywhere and always, laptops, iPads, and smartphones construct a mobile labor camp. "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" is a true portrayal of this labor state. As the group uses new technology most frequently, the cross-boundary use of mobile technology greatly consumes young people's spirit and psychology. We can imagine that conflicts between youth work and life will become increasingly severe. After work, that taut nerve won't relax; during rest, they can't effectively recover physical and mental strength. Inevitably, returning to work will be full of inefficiency and complaints. The vicious cycle of involution is thus reproduced, making them "emptied people."
Fragmented Time — People Being Discarded
"Up or out" is a personnel system currently implemented by many universities and research institutions. The core of this system is signing contracts with time conditions when hiring employees, evaluating employees' workload at the required deadline, and dismissing them if they don't meet contract conditions. For example, some universities require new teachers to publish a certain number of research results or provide two promotion opportunities within 5 or 6 years; if standards aren't met, they must leave. The "up or out" system originated from American universities as an auxiliary rule for the tenure system. After introducing this system, many universities, especially key universities in China, eagerly adopted it. We must admit that this system has to some extent eliminated the drawbacks of the traditional tenure system for university teachers. Long-standing issues like unit dependency, egalitarianism, and seniority have improved. However, new problems caused by this system have gradually emerged.
Under the red line of contract deadlines, young scholars face enormous pressure to publish articles—"publish or perish." If a scholar doesn't publish articles for several years, it means the end of their entire professional career. Measuring a scholar's level depends not on whether they've proposed excellent theories and novel viewpoints, but on the quantity of published articles and the level of journals they're published in. Under such a mechanism design, how can deep thinking and careful refinement be ensured? Of course, even publishing the required number of results doesn't necessarily guarantee obtaining tenure, as positions are limited. Only by publishing more and faster than others is there a chance to ultimately win. Indicators exist to be exceeded.
For young people wanting to engage in scientific research, obtaining a doctoral degree doesn't guarantee a stable teaching position. A doctoral degree is just the starting point of the scientific research path; one must go through several stages of tempering before gaining intermittent breathing space. From a time sequence, if a person studies continuously without stopping, they will graduate with a doctoral degree around age 28. Six years later, when obtaining tenure, they'll be approaching 35 (some universities require doctoral graduates to first enter postdoctoral positions for two years, then be selected to enter the school after completing the postdoc, and then undergo a 6-year "up or out" assessment, before finally obtaining a long-term contract around age 37). For many female university teachers, delaying childbirth becomes an inevitable choice to ensure successful doctoral graduation and maintain high productivity during the "up or out" assessment period. In the research, a young female teacher said: "I really have no choice; I truly dare not have children. Both physically and mentally, it's not allowed. Every year, the college has research rankings. Seeing other teachers continuously publishing articles, I feel extremely frightened. This fear makes it impossible for me to settle down and make necessary preparations for childbirth."
"Up or out" accelerates scholars' cognitive output speed but reduces their possibility of engaging in deeper research. This mechanism design, carrying deadlines, is compulsory for scholars and inescapable. Thus, faced with scientific research requiring long-term breakthroughs, young teachers' academic heights are continuously lowered, research breadth continuously trimmed, ultimately abandoning the possibility of pursuing greatness and indulging in "trivial technique" style research results that are quick to publish and have high probability.
The elimination system triggered by "up or out" has also been widely borrowed by other fields, forming the so-called "age 35 phenomenon." Today, many employers set recruitment thresholds as "age 35 or below." No household registration over 35, no civil service examinations over 35, no full-time employees over 35... exclusion clauses for those over 35 are everywhere around us, and everyone has become accustomed to them, even taking them for granted. Age 35 is the upper age limit for youth defined by the national "Medium and Long-term Youth Development Plan (2016-2025)." After this age, people's values become more mature, industry experience more complete, and married life tends to stabilize. It can be said that when a person leaves youth, they should enter a more stable and better new life stage. But in reality, we see more and more young people feeling lost about life after 35. A popular online article "90s Generation Being Discontinued, No Longer Produced" states: "For excellent people, they can seize opportunities, so when the next generation of young people takes the stage, they aren't actually leaving the stage but going to a higher platform... For mediocre people, when new people take the stage, it also means that perhaps the only time they were proud of is about to become dim." At 35, the way individuals are placed or thrown into the world suddenly changes; no one is willing to wait for your success and invest in your life anymore. We can bluntly say that the entire society is "very unfriendly" to workers over 35.
For "programmers," age 35 means their career needs to change "tracks." In internet companies, "programmers" mainly have two promotion channels: the technical path and the management path. If sticking to the technical path, they need to progress through "programmer - technical supervisor - senior technician - architect," requiring deep understanding of technical underlying logic, constant updating of personal technology, improved development experience, and tracking industry trends. They must maintain enthusiasm for continuous learning and keep climbing increasingly narrow high ladders. The higher they go, the narrower the ladder, naturally increasing competitive pressure. Very few people ultimately achieve the leap from "programmer" to "architect." Most people turn to operation or management positions after seeing no hope—the management path. The management path involves "programmers" transferring from technical positions to operations or project management, using their previous technical development advantages to help enterprises complete project operation and management efficiently. However, because most "programmers" haven't accumulated management experience and lack personality traits and theoretical preparation related to management, their management work is highly substitutable, always facing the risk of elimination. As one internet company HR manager said in the research: "If we compare a 'programmer' to a battery, this position is actually quite cruel. It updates too fast, competition is too fierce, you simply can't keep up with learning, willing but unable. By age 35, you'll find younger people are cheaper, with more energy and stronger competitiveness. So from working in 2015 until now, we basically haven't seen 'old people' over 40 in this position. I'm not sure where they eventually go; some may return to their hometowns."
The same phenomenon occurs with food delivery riders. The research team's survey showed that only 14.26% of respondents were satisfied with their current job stability, 95.59% agreed that "food delivery is a 'youth-eating' industry," 87.11% agreed that "I'm more easily iterated by technology," and 96.34% agreed that "food delivery riders are more prone to midlife crises." The research team found that most food delivery riders don't have their own career planning. Although they're very worried about their future, they feel there's nothing they can do because it's beyond their cognitive scope. One rider candidly said in an interview: "We all actually know we can't deliver food for a lifetime. When we can't run anymore, what else can we do? No one tells us how to improve ourselves, and there's no time for us to improve ourselves. We're just waiting for the day we can't run anymore while continuously running."
Society has laid out a time track for life development. We set off along the track, forming a life schedule that society considers "reasonable" and "correct." In this schedule, individuals obtain a life through qualification examinations and status leaps. The social life is like a clock, moving forward with ticking sounds, with qualifications and status during the forward movement jointly determined by social life or institutional structure. Most professions have their own time nodes reached by social consensus, containing what state each position should achieve at what time. If expected results or recognized positions can't be achieved within the prescribed time, life may "break." This "break" means many opportunities suddenly disappear before you; you're deprived of the right to participate in competition or the qualification to engage in certain work. This life turning point caused by the appearance of a certain moment is what the author calls "fragmented time." Even if a person has great potential and their future might bring returns exceeding expectations, if they can't prove themselves before the time breaks, they will forever lose the opportunity to prove it.
Time flows like a surging river, day and night, never ceasing to pass. Fragmented time isn't the cessation of time but a turning point in fate. When realizing that life will break at a certain moment, a mysterious tension emerges, because this predicts that in the near future, a foreseeable major event must occur. Because this expectation has formed, psychological breakage appears before factual breakage, giving fragmented time a special "discarding structure." Before the mobile internet era, things were replaced only when broken or non-functional, and even then, mostly replaced with almost identical things. But now the opposite is true; physical discarding has been replaced by psychological discarding. Thinking back to phones we've used, how many were truly broken before replacement? We almost always replace things before they wear out. When we believe things aren't "new" though not "broken," we replace them before the moment of scrapping arrives. This discarding of objects now extends to people themselves. Young people who haven't kept up with society's rhythm or stepped on time's beats become "discarded people" in our era.
Young People Alienated by Time
Time is a form of power; whoever controls the allocation of time and the interpretation of time controls social life. Clocks walk by themselves, becoming increasingly precise, and in the process of clocks walking, people gradually surrender their rights. The industrial age created an artificial world where the time system was separated and became an alien force. After entering the mobile internet era, humans increasingly hand over their grasp of time, losing control over time. It seems some people control others' time, but controllers are also controlled by time. It's no longer certain people monopolizing time power; time controls everyone. Time begins to show its tyranny.
Time's tyranny is also manifested in time becoming life's baton, the highest value standard. The entire society seems like a huge machine, operating orderly under time's command. No one can escape time's control or resist time's authority. Time should have been an existence within ourselves but has now been completely stripped away, becoming a pass for the entire society to worship efficiency above all. Standards for measuring, recording, examining, and evaluating people through time not only fail to enhance our sense of time but cause our free time to be occupied, to the extent that we can't perceive time ourselves.
The three forms of youth labor mentioned above are the most vivid manifestations of time's tyranny. It occurs not only with food delivery riders ("hummingbirds"), young internet engineers ("programmers"), and young university teachers ("worker bees") but is also happening or about to happen to each of us. Corresponding to three time forms, three types of youth "alienated" by time derive—accelerated people, emptied people, discarded people. The author uses passive expressions because this alienation is packaged as "hard work" or "cherishing time" role models, prevailing in society and enticing more youth to join the "racing" camp.
Time's tyranny invariably praises extended work and advocates speed culture. In the labor process, what youth experience isn't how capital takes responsibility for their future, guarantees their health, and protects their rights, but a "rare learning opportunity," "glory of strivers," or "favor that shouldn't have been given," as if having such hard work, having the opportunity to work overtime, is a blessing earned by workers. But the question is, are these so-called "blessings" truly blessings for youth? Are they blessings that youth really need? Are they blessings for youth or blessings that capital can enjoy effortlessly? We must start to consider: What kind of society allows youth to realize their dreams and live happy lives without sacrificing health and free time? How do we achieve this goal? From historical experience over the past centuries, this won't be a spontaneous result of market processes.
When analyzing human alienation, Marx pointed out that once entering the production and labor process, capital often considers not human needs and ability development but interest maximization. The characteristic of youth is that people at this age haven't entered or fully entered labor contract social relationships, temporarily maintaining hope for pursuing comprehensive human development and freedom of action. In human life, the significance of youth isn't just age distinction or physiological vigor but being a "complete person" not troubled by alienation before social division of labor, a "future person" pursuing comprehensive personality development and lofty ideal values, a "free person" who can control their time and has the right to dispose of their time. freedom is based on time that humans can freely dispose of. Without freely disposable time, people will always be in toil and busyness, meaning no freedom at all. In this sense, Marx always understood time as the horizon where human freedom unfolds, believing that "time is actually human active existence; it's not only the measure of human life but also the space for human development." Throughout human history, almost all great creations, including literature, art, and science, were completed in free time, because "for the entire society, creating freely disposable time is also creating time that produces science, art, etc." Youth, positioned earlier in the life cycle, is precisely the most abundant period for creation and exploration; they should enjoy more freely disposable time.
Emphasizing to young people the importance of not wasting time and working hard is unobjectionable and extremely necessary. But we must also be vigilant against utilitarian practices that abuse youth and drain youth under the guise of struggle. Efficiency-first ideology derived from time sees youth as mere means to achieve external purposes, simplifying life into a process of suffering now for more future wealth, money, and fame, forgetting that youth itself is a form of human existence and the most important molding stage for individuals to grow into social forces. A society that excessively overdraws "youth" and "tempts" youth with utilitarianism, though possibly having current rapid development, will show huge negative effects of "resistance" and "fatigue" in the future. In fact, many have noticed that among youth, there often emerge "sighing about age" groups who lament the passage of time, "corporate cattle" who self-deprecate despite high salaries, "demotivational culture" characterized by sighs and pessimism, and "involution" with highly singular competition modes. These phenomena reflect a "cognitive misplacement" of youth as an important national development force. Youth are the future masters of the country, not anyone's "corporate cattle." Isn't the country the country of the youth? Where have the master spirit and proud feeling of youth being flesh and blood, spiritually connected, and destiny-linked with the country gone?
In many young people's eyes, youth has apparently become a time transaction. They helplessly say, "Capital actually takes advantage of your youth to buy your labor at low cost, spending the least money to buy most of your time." This view hides a metaphor about time: youth is the most valuable commodity. Once youth form the concept that their youth can be cheaply sold by time, they naturally accept capital's arbitrary slicing of their time. Such youth is no different from a deal with the devil. On one hand, this transaction externally manifests as competition with others. Because youth time is limited, one must walk in competition. Surrounding people become "enemies," not partners. Only by surpassing others can one win out during the most valuable age stage of life. Thus, delivering parcels, writing code,and publishing articles—originally meaningful things—ultimately degenerate into competitive arenas, and the journey of struggle evolves into a tragedy of social Darwinism. On the other hand, this transaction internally manifests as self-competition. Competitive pressure constantly vies with personal free life for time. The time disciplines mentioned above—such as fines for delayed delivery, rebukes for not promptly responding to superiors' instructions after work, and elimination through "up or out"—gradually generalize and intensify. The free self continuously retreats from time, becoming a work machine completely controlled by outside forces. No wonder some young people say: "After work, it's a process of continuous self-disappearance. First time disappears, then emotions disappear, and finally even the self disappears." The alienation of time brings a wilderness of humanity. In a world rallied by speed, no one is a winner.
Squeeze or Stimulate? Another Understanding of Youth from the Time Dimension
Although the entire society is accelerating today, and time's tyranny impacts all social members with certain universality, youth are hit first and foremost. The specificity of time's tyranny for youth lies in the fact that much tyranny originates from extreme time pressure from the demand side on the supply side, and youth are obviously the main body of labor supply, the main object of tyranny implementation. Moreover, as internet natives, contemporary youth have lived since childhood under the fastest time rate in human history and have had their lives fully occupied by this accelerated time.
In this sense, understanding and recognizing time becomes extremely important because it reflects how a social system views youth, treats young people, and helps individuals through the most precious period of life. This isn't just a simple value guidance issue but a major practical issue of how to establish protection mechanisms for a life stage where creativity, absorption, and action are all extremely strong. If we don't fundamentally attach importance to time's exploitation of youth and eliminate youth anxiety about time from the heart, this mentality will extend upward to people's adolescence and childhood. Increasingly intense "tiger moms," "wolf dads" push kids to be the best, and "childhoods that can't be delayed," "adolescence that can't fail," and other constantly advancing survival-of-the-fittest consciousness are vivid evidence. People have to rush from birth, or they'll "lose at the starting line."
Youth is an important stage in the human lifetime, an important manifestation form of humans. Cottle TJ and Klineberg S L. noted that compared to other animals, humans spend less time in the present; human thoughts and behaviors are more oriented toward the future. Some scholars believe that children's thoughts and actions are mostly oriented toward the present, middle-aged and elderly people's thoughts and actions are more oriented toward the past, only youth's thoughts and actions are oriented toward the future. Therefore, youth essentially points to an important dimension of time—the future. We often say "time passing" and "youth no more," but not "time generating" or "present arriving." Of course, for purely present sequences, both make sense, but the "passing" expression contains a kind of future-first priority. Only in future-first can the present be understood as the "disappearing" present. We see the time flow as an irreversible flow, but this irreversibility isn't visible in the "present" sequence. In fact, this irreversibility comes from the basic way of "future-first" time. This time view inherent in youth itself, pointing to the future, makes people more inclined to pursue a better tomorrow during youth. Thus, with future benefits as bait, capital can carefully plan a system to dominate youth. Under this system design, capital deliberately encourages youth to squeeze time and often establishes time illusions of sacrificing current time to realize future value. For example, in many high-growth industries, young people have heard many wealth-creating "myths," which strongly stimulate them to eagerly try, eagerly move, and desperately want to achieve their goals in the shortest time. China seems like a high-speed train; young people's biggest worry is not being able to catch the next train because this train might be the last train. What they've already gained they can't lose again, and what they haven't gained they must obtain somehow. Everyone is influenced by the so-called "beautiful" vision and pressured by the entire group—a kind of intentional or unintentional mutual comparison and self-reinforcement, breeding a nameless fear of constantly worrying about being left behind by the times.
Under the shadow of this fear, young people believe today's life is for future sacrifice and overdraft. They have suspended their social subjectivity, showing anxiety about constantly wanting to grasp something but not being able to grasp it, and an urgent psychology hoping for material life to change quickly. Thus, through the time system established by monopolized interests, tentacles extend to all aspects of youth life. This system, through interest inducement and cognitive brainwashing, makes youth fully identify with and actively participate in the scramble for time. Young people sell their current time, not entirely for current income, but for a cross-time-space transaction with possible high future returns, or based on faith in future rich returns. No one knows whether this "gamble" will ultimately win or lose, but at least now, youth still hold great expectations for it.
The significance of youth is a force that makes society full of vitality and nurtures life, meaning not stubborn, not conservative, not rigid, with eternal internal dissatisfaction and non-abandonment. Our system design shouldn't be confined to consuming youth's current physical and mental energy to the extreme but should focus more on the moral stance of time, investing in youth's future development, making innovation stimulation the starting point of system design, and then establishing the system on the nature of youth. We need to make time more tolerant and flexible, providing material rewards to winners of time competition while spiritually comforting losers of time competition, actively building the future-oriented value orientation of the national governance system, and establishing a recognition mechanism for each young person's struggle results and labor value from the institutional arrangement level. Meanwhile, we should guide youth to reflect on values stemming from "fast" from the spiritual level, such as individual, present, achievement, competition, efficiency, elimination, busyness, acceleration, growth, etc., while those "slow" values long ignored by us should be re-emphasized and gradually cultivated, such as collective, relationship, community, vision, cooperation, patience, leisure, waiting... Although this call may be a drop in the bucket, for the next generation, we must take action.
Youth's nature is abundant and agile. What youth need isn't just time management but not being managed by time. The youth we hope for aren't youth ravaged by time's tyranny but youth who can see a bright future and feel every day. When a person is both immersed in the present and looks up to see dreams, they transcend time and transcend themselves. When one-day, youth are no longer troubled by speed, no longer panicked about being outdated, and no longer worried about the future, their creativity will naturally open, their vitality will automatically burst forth, and with it will come to a spiritual gift—happiness. We hope youth can have more free time to empty themselves; this emptying isn't indulgence but fully experiencing the joy of life, the joy of work, and the joy of social relationships.
Youth bear both the imprint of the past and the birthmark of the future, with different meanings in reality and the future. In real social life, youth are weak. But if we extend our historical vision, youth are strong; youth can't change the "present" but are destined to shape the future. A country that doesn't value "youth" is a shortsighted country, while a country that cares for and protects "youth" has turned its gaze to the distance. How to treat the most creative and vibrant age stage in human life—youth—the Chinese nation should have greater wisdom and deeper consideration. Do we consume youth by burning forests to hunt, draining ponds to catch fish? Or do we let it flow freely, uninhibitedly indulging youth? Or do we stimulate human potential in the process of experiencing youth, letting youth leave the most beautiful memories in life? These are all worth continuing to think about and savor for a long time...
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