What does involution mean?

Involution means: intuitively speaking, it means "evolving inwards". To put it more broadly, all consumption without substantial meaning can be called involution.

The source is as follows:

The earliest "source" of "Involution" is a few pictures of top students from famous schools.

Some of the "involution" pictures that hit the circle of friends are as follows: some people are reading books on bicycles, some people have piles of books on their dormitory beds, and some people even While riding a bike, I was writing a paper with my computer in hand. These pictures were first circulated among top academics at Tsinghua University and Peking University.

Later, popular terms such as "Tsinghua University's Volume King" and "Tsinghua University's Paper King" became hot searches, and related emoticons also appeared on many college students' social software.

Let’s understand the difference between involution and internal friction, so that it will be easier to understand:

1. Involution means evolving “inward”, becoming more and more sophisticated and complex , in fact, they are all repetitions of several fixed patterns, without the creativity to break out of the patterns. Simply put, involution is low-level complexity;

2. Involution is not internal friction and will not necessarily lower living standards. People who fall into involution are likely to enjoy it;

3. Internal friction is an imminent crisis, while involution is a longer-term worry.

A short story about involution

There is a small town with many shoe stores. These shoe stores open at 10 a.m. every day and have a lunch break from 12 noon to 2 p.m. , continue to operate from 2 pm to 6 pm; open 5 days a week from Monday to Friday, closed on weekends.

In the hottest days of summer, shoe store owners will close their stores one after another and go to the southern seaside for vacation; during the coldest days of winter, shoe store owners will also close their stores one after another. Go skiing in the mountains in the north.

Then one day, for unknown reasons, a family moved from a big city to a small town and opened a shoe store. Although the town is small, it can still be considered to be of a certain scale, and the balance of supply and demand for shoes will not be broken by the addition of a new shoe store. Their shoe store opens at 7 o'clock every morning, does not close at noon, and does not close until 11 o'clock at night; they are also open on weekends, and they never go on vacation in summer and winter.

But small town bosses did not admit defeat. They imitated the schedules of people in big cities, working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their "diligence" was also "rewarded": their operating income returned to its previous state.

So, what changes have occurred in small town life at this time? Since the population of the town has not increased, the demand for shoes remains constant, the same as before, so the final operating income of each shoe store remains unchanged and will not increase. In other words, their working hours have become longer, but their income has not increased. This is involution.