Tang Ping

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.

(internet slang) A Western social media trend of adopting Chinese norms and traditions.

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.

The compulsive habit of staying up far too late scrolling, watching shows or gaming, in order to reclaim a sense of personal time that the working day swallowed. The phrase is a translation of the Chinese "报复性熬夜" (bàofùxìng áoyè) — literally "retaliatory staying up late" — that went viral on Sina Weibo around 2018 and crossed into English via a 2020 BBC article. It describes a vicious cycle: long, autonomy-poor working hours lead to late-night phone use, which leads to under-sleeping, which leads to a worse working day, which leads to more retaliation. Strongly associated with overwork cultures and the smartphone era.

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.