Lying Flat

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 deliberately positive flip of quiet quitting, coined in a 2022 Washington Post piece by psychotherapist Lesley Alderman: instead of mentally checking out of a job you can't or won't leave, you make small, intentional adjustments — building a friendship with a colleague, taking real breaks, picking up a more interesting side project, redecorating your desk — that quietly improve your day-to-day experience of work. Quiet thriving is framed as an individual coping strategy rather than a structural fix, and is often promoted by HR and wellbeing teams precisely because it asks the employee, not the employer, to do the work of feeling better.

A self-care work hack popularised on TikTok in 2023 by creator Marisa Jo Mayes, in which the first day of the working week is deliberately spent doing only the minimum required tasks — no aggressive to-do list, no back-to-back meetings, no "starting the week strong". The idea is to ease into work gradually as an antidote to Sunday-night anxiety and burnout culture, then ramp up effort across Tuesday–Thursday. Bare Minimum Monday sits alongside quiet quitting and lazy girl jobs as part of a broader Gen-Z rejection of always-on productivity, and is most often discussed by remote and knowledge workers with control over their own calendars.