"Lying Flat" Movement - The Psychosocial Factors That Underpin the Wide-spread Rejection of Over-work Culture in Academic and Professional Marketplaces

In contemporary China, citizens are making radically different lifestyle choices in response to societal pressures. Some people are choosing to compete for limited spots in an increasingly competitive academic and professional market. By contrast, other people are choosing to withdraw from the competition and lie flat, sometimes retreating to utopian settlements. This paper investigates psychological factors that may encourage people either to engage with Chinas strenuous academic and professional competition, or to withdraw from it. The people being investigated in this paper came from cities all over China, include but not limited to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing. The majority of these immigrants came from large cities that are prominent in stress and have high consumption level. Indeed, many of them have suffered from parental expectations, peer comparison, confusion about their future development, inability to purchase their own housing properties, long working hours, dissatisfaction regard their previous job or simply could not tolerate the intense working conditions anymore. Here, three sets of psychological constructs are evaluated as potential determinants of peoples diverging lifestyle choices: (i.) Stress Mindsets; (ii.) Locus of Control; (iii. Big Five personality factors and their relation to Academic Motivation. All three of these constructs are argued to be potentially useful for explaining peoples lifestyle choices.