The English-language adoption of China's "tang ping" movement: a deliberate decision to opt out of hustle culture by doing only what's necessary to live, refusing extra hours, declining promotions and reducing material ambitions.
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A 2021 Chinese social movement and lifestyle stance whose name (躺平, literally "lying flat") describes a deliberate withdrawal from the country's intense work culture: doing the minimum to get by, refusing to chase promotions, marriage or property, and rejecting the "996" schedule (9am–9pm, six days a week). Tang ping went viral via a now-deleted Baidu Tieba post in April 2021 and was quickly censored across Chinese social media as state outlets denounced it. It is the direct ancestor of the Western "lying flat" and feeds into the broader global vocabulary of quiet quitting, the Great Resignation and lazy girl jobs as expressions of anti-hustle sentiment.
(Australian) Lazy, sleeping.
A slow-living aesthetic that took off on TikTok in late 2023, in which young women publicly slow everything down — long morning routines, cooking from scratch, working part-time, going to bed early — as an explicit rejection of hustle culture and the "girlboss" archetype that preceded it. The phrase was popularised by creator Sienna Ludbey, who framed her own pivot away from a high-pressure career as entering her "snail girl era". It overlaps with cottagecore, soft-life and that-girl trends, but the snail-girl framing is more specifically anti-work: the slowness is the point, and the snail emoji often signs the posts.
The English-language adoption of China's "tang ping" movement: a deliberate decision to opt out of hustle culture by doing only what's necessary to live, refusing extra hours, declining promotions and reducing material ambitions. Picked up by Western journalists and TikTok creators from 2021 onward, "lying flat" became a useful umbrella term for a cluster of related stances — quiet quitting, the lazy girl job, snail girl era — that all reject the assumption that career advancement should be life's organising principle. Some commentators frame lying flat as a soft labour protest, others as a personal mental-health strategy; in practice both readings overlap.
I'm lying flat for at least a year — minimum effort, no LinkedIn updates, just enough work to keep the lights on.
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