[maxglute]

Those same mid kids would likely work a medicore blue collar job but be able to afford real estate after a few years of saving while the market was low. Some of them might be lucky and have first mover entreprenured their way to being million/billionaires despite not being very bright (like Ma). Same lament as kids in west when their parents worked mid jobs and could raise a family. Dual income young professional households who can't buy a house while their parents without degrees have multipe + land in cottage country. Now PRC kids dealing with same shit kids in west are, academic inflation + increase cost of living + easy speculative R/E wealth is gone. Meanwhile no one wants to do "hard" work because they spend too much time in school to do manual labour. They want top 10% income air conditioned office jobs befitting their degree.

I'm not saying it's not serious, it's also not particularly special to PRC. Like the few tanping kids I hear about IRL in PRC are like your typical western kids with comfortably wealthy boomer parents who can afford to fuck around because they got safety net/inheritance down the line. Everyone else grinding while joking about tanping, like antiwork folks in the west bitch about their conditions, but eat continue to eat shit all the same.