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).
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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.
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.
After two years of 996 grind he embraced tang ping — moved back in with his parents, took a quiet government job, and stopped pretending to care about KPIs.
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