Recently, everyone must have heard the word "involution" to some extent, right? What exactly is the "involution" that everyone is talking about~

As a sociological concept, involution originated from the 1963 book "Involution" by American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Agricultural involution - the process of ecological change in Indonesia"

The counterpart to involution is evolution

Geertz used this concept to answer the question Why does Java, a populous island in Indonesia, not develop in a capital- and technology-intensive direction like other nearby islands, but instead continues to develop in a labor-intensive direction. At this macro level, the question that "involution" wants to answer is why a region's economic model has not "evolved."

To put it simply, fierce competition at a low level cannot allow the industry to evolve to a higher stage. This is "involution." The harder everyone works, the greater the unnecessary losses will be. However, the "cake" is still as big as before, but the number of people eating the cake and the difficulty of eating the cake have increased.

In 1932, the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter distinguished the difference between growth and development in an article, which can make it easier for us to understand "involution" : Steady and visible growth inhibits development of genuine novelty.

The concept of "involution" reminds of a "rigidity of the model". In other words, a slow growth will suppress our urgency to change until it is too late.

However, the "involution" that has frequently appeared in everyone's field of vision recently has somewhat deviated from its original meaning. We are not referring to the evolution of the economic model like the economists mentioned above, but are describing the "difficulty" of current life.

What we often talk about now as "involution" not only means that we have paid too much to have a competitive advantage, but also means that we have been repeatedly doing meaningless things. It seems that people are forced to be enclosed in the "inside" with "no way out", forced to fold and "roll" themselves up, and are trapped in it. The more curled up, the smaller the person's living space becomes.

For example, "996", but the salary has not increased, but some people choose to work overtime in order to compete and get promoted, while other employees are afraid that if they don't work overtime, it will appear that they are not working hard or they will be fired, so they will follow suit. Work overtime. If the company's performance does not get better as a result, everyone does not make more money, and they are still tired to work overtime day after day. This kind of self-repetition and self-depletion is the embodiment of "involution."

The "involution" used by people now is more of a vent, showing the powerlessness of scarce resources, the hardship in active and passive fierce competition, and the maliciousness and absurdity in competition. Human irony and helplessness.