Cui Qinglong on Burnout

Cui Qinglong, “Why Are We More and More Exhausted?”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The interview translated here is related to my ongoing interest in mental health issues in China, growing out of the experience of my visit of May 2023, when people spoke to me movingly about the stress they had endured during the three years of China’s zero-covid policy.  Ironically, this stress did not disappear when Chinese authorities abruptly ended the policy in early December of 2022, because the omicron virus predictably ravaged China’s largely unprepared population over the following weeks. 

Virtually everyone got sick – or at least this is how people talk about it now – and many died, while the Party-State declared victory. This display of cynicism and incompetence left many Chinese – particularly young Chinese – angry, depressed, and unsure about certain core beliefs that had once made their lives make sense.  Virtually everyone I met in China acknowledged this, suggesting that China as a society is perhaps trying to deal with some version of collective PTSD, largely alone and in silence, at the same time as the economy sputters and youth unemployment reaches unprecedented levels.
 
Chinese authorities are of course aware of the impending crisis and are addressing it indirectly by allowing, perhaps even encouraging, discussion of depression and similar themes in important venues, such the journals and platforms I follow.  I noted at least two such in the last few weeks – and there may well be more, as I am too busy with other projects right now to spend time with Chinese media every day - one in Exploration and Free Views by Fan Hao, entitled “Behind Depression, There Is Also the Problem of Retreating from the World of Meaning,” and another in The Intellectual by Cai Yuanhan, entitled “Only 0.5% of Chinese Patients with Depressive Disorders Receive Adequate Treatment.” 

I started to translate Fan’s text, but found that, for him, the world of meaning from which we have retreated is the pre-virtual world, which is surely true, but to me the message seems to be delivered somewhat superciliously – imagine a philosophy professor preaching to a bunch of kids looking at their cellphones – and seemed to me likely to fall on deaf ears (if I haven’t grasped all of Fan’s message, my apologies).  By contrast, the piece in The Intellectual seems to consist largely of data, and its main conclusion is delivered in its title.  Both of these pieces struck me as efforts to talk about the issue without really saying very much.
 
While working on these texts, I also happened upon Cui Qinglong, who was interviewed for a book I picked up in Beijing called The Issues Issue 多谈谈问题, a book of interviews edited by my friend Wu Qi 吴琦 that is well worth spending time with.  Cui is a psychiatrist with an important online presence in which he addresses the issues of the day, often from his personal perspective as a counselor.  He tries to publish every day on his Weibo blog, which is slightly retro, since most people have moved from Weibo to WeChat.  WeChat is oriented more toward friend groups and is preferred by authorities because of its narrower focus, while Weibo addresses the public at large, which is why the Party herded people away from it; I assume this is the statement Cui is making by using this platform. 
 
The interview with Cui in The Issues Issue is entitled “How Should We Remain Optimistic in an Era of Decline?” but interviewer Luo Danyi’s first question to him cut to the quick: “Are we all depressed?  Are we all sick?”  Online versions of the interview subsequently chose the title “Are We All Depressed?” (see here for the original version on the Dandu site – Dandu published The Issues Issue - and here for a lengthy excerpt on the popular Pengpai site). I may eventually translate “Are We All Depressed?” but Cui Qinglong became famous for a different interview in People magazine (Renwu 任务), published in late March of 2022, when China was well into its third year of zero-covid, and Shanghai was in full lockdown.  This interview, entitled “Why Are We More and More Exhausted?” is the text translated here.
 
The general theme of Cui’s interview is the phenomenon of burnout.  He mentions the pandemic and the way the pandemic has upended everyone’s life, but does not dwell on the theme, in part because this might be politically dangerous, but also because, in China as in the United States and elsewhere, the pandemic led many people to question their work and work lives at a fundamental level.  This is Cui’s focus, because the issue is very fraught for many Chinese young people.
 
Cui is certainly no rebel-rouser, and he speaks more often than not in the language of emotional cost-efficiency (“recharging depleted emotional batteries”), but his message is that in terms of work, which is where most of us spend most of our lives, the Chinese system is simply asking too much, and people have every right to step away for their own emotional and even physical well-being.  I particularly liked this quote, which I think aptly captures the kind of productive machine the Chinese economy has become:   
 
“Zooming out, if we look at human society as a huge engine, since about the year 2000, it has been revving faster and faster. The RPM of this social engine determines the RPM of those of us who make up its parts. The social engine is constantly remaking itself, becoming a more advanced version, meaning that it requires parts of a higher specification.  There is an implicit standard for what kind of identity, job, and income we want, what kind of house we expect to live in, and this standard sets the basis for what most of us understand and accept in terms of life goals and expectations.  The social engine impels us to constantly keep up and adjust, passively synchronizing with the ever-accelerating RPM if we want to achieve our goals.”

Of course, Cui could be talking about the world at large, and not just about China.
 
Cui notes that positive images of happy workaholics dominated Chinese popular culture ten or twenty years ago, but are now met with hostility, because now that work has become a zero-sum game, the workaholic’s gain is your loss.  The entirety of Cui’s message focuses on helping people “to retrieve their original nature after they have been overly instrumentalized.”  He addresses both people who want to remain in the workplace and those who have had it.  For those who choose to work he suggests “life hacks” that will help them to maintain their vitality, even as he assures them that it is okay to throw in the towel on occasion.  For those who have had enough, Cui asserts that:
 
“Passive lying flat is also perfectly acceptable, it's a cost-effective lifestyle choice that must be respected. Although not many people really put this into practice, and most of the time it’s kind of a joke, on a spiritual level it has become a power move with which many people attempt to identify and empathize – the power of giving up. As I've said before, our society increasingly lacks a restart mechanism that will let us pick ourselves up after we fail, a safe space where we can fail and temporarily come clean about out giving up.”
 
This of course is not the message coming from Chinese authorities, who are telling young people not to be so picky about their jobs (and who on August 15, 2023 announced the suspension of monthly reports on youth unemployment rates), nor from employers, who face a buyer’s market, which does not mean individual employers may not respect worker concerns.  
​
As I was preparing this post, I happened to listen to an interview with Ben Domenech on the Ezra Klein Show.  Domenech is a thoughtful conservative, and the point of the interview was to discuss how the Republican Party has changed its policy preferences since 2016.  Toward the end of the interview, Domenech was asked what policies he would prioritize if it were up to him, and among other things he mentioned a much more robust push-back against Chinese expansionism, as well as family-friendly policies in the United States that would allow people to better deal with work-life stress.  I could not help but notice that in terms of domestic social policies, he was asking for the same things for American families that Cui Qinglong (or Liang Zhang, in another recent post) is asking for for Chinese families.  I’m in no way accusing Domenech of contradicting himself here.  China can be a bad actor on the international scene and treat its workers badly.  At the same time, I think it is important to recognize the extent to which Chinese and Americans face similar problems in their daily lives.
 
Translation
 
People: In your own work, what are your observations about this state of “collective burnout jiti juandai/集体倦怠” in which we seem to find ourselves?
 
Cui Qinglong:  More and more, what I’m seeing is that many people are in no condition to take on anything very challenging and are not motivated to do so.  Everyone is complaining about feeling run-down and seems to be searching for some kind of comfort.  Take for example the person who switches to a completely different mode after they get home from work.  At work, they are full of energy and competence, but once they get off work, they do nothing at all, just lie in bed scrolling through their cellphone or maybe watching a show.  Our behavior now has become quite fragmented, and it's hard to spend a whole block of time concentrating on anything.
 
To put it another way, it should be normal for people to wake up energized, feeling confident that they will manage to accomplish some of the things they want to do as they face the day.  But now, everyone has suddenly realized that things haven’t worked like this for a long time, that they don’t know why, and that life actually should be different.
 
People have their own way of interpreting such feelings, and tell themselves that burnout is just temporary, that they’re just a little tired, that they’ve been working too much recently, and that they’ll get over it and be fine before long.  This is how they explain it away.  This explanation is a rationalization of what they are feeling and does not take it seriously.
  
People: From what you’ve seen, at what stage does burnout begin to manifest itself for most people?
 
Cui Qinglong: Workers in some large factories and Internet companies face the risk of layoffs once they reach the age of 35.  This is how society treats people of this age in order to guarantee its own operational efficiency.  This age is when people feel the most pressure, having to take care of their parents as well as their children, dealing with their mortgages and their kids’ education, as well as competition at work.  So 35 is the age when people face the most pressure and is also the age when it is easiest to experience burnout.
 
At the same time, I have also observed that more and more young people are beginning to experience burnout. Young people I encounter around town or in discussion forums rarely demonstrate any longing for life or real enthusiasm to try hard at anything. The reasons for the early burnout among young people may vary, but in the big picture, competition is the main driver, as well as the effects of competition on work and emotions, and we must include of course the trauma people bring from their individual family experiences. This is a complex problem, but the result is that everybody frequently experiences a kind of burnout that leaves them weak and powerless, even if there may be different causes at play. 
 
People: You talk about this in your online writing, and I wonder what triggered your thinking about burnout?
 
Cui Qinglong: I have struggled with similar problems myself. There was a time when I took on more work than I could handle, and after a long period when my burden exceeded my capacity to deal with things, I found that my mindset began to change, that I had less and less patience in doing certain things, less tolerance for certain emotions.  It got to the point that even the feelings I experienced from leisure were not satisfying.
 
I came to realize that I was in a chronic state of mental overload, and that it was not just me, but maybe everybody around me. Once I came to this realization, I made certain adjustments to the structure of my life, after which I felt much better. So my thoughts were that this is a common problem, and maybe I can figure out some way to present it systematically, so I decided to write about it and share it online.
 
People: Why do we always feel more and more exhausted?
 
Cui Qinglong: There are some common factors in our social environment that help to explain things. The first is that the pandemic turned the structure of everyone’s life upside down, meaning we all had to adapt to something new. The emotional space in which we move around and connect with friends has shrunk, and we are far less plugged into communities than before.
 
Zooming out, if we look at human society as a huge engine, since about the year 2000, it has been revving faster and faster. The RPM of this social engine determines the RPM of those of us who make up its parts. The social engine is constantly remaking itself, becoming a more advanced version, meaning that it requires parts of a higher specification.  There is an implicit standard for what kind of identity, job, and income we want, what kind of house we expect to live in, and this standard sets the basis for what most of us understand and accept in terms of life goals and expectations.  The social engine impels us to constantly keep up and adjust, passively synchronizing with the ever accelerating RPM if we want to achieve our goals.
 
It used to be that you could have a regular job and enjoy everything that society had to offer, meaning education, health care, a house.   Although the quality of life in those days was not as good as it is now, generally speaking, everyone had more or less equal opportunities. There was competition then, too, but it was a kind of incremental competition, in which everyone still had the chance to rise to a higher position in their respective fields, to break through to something new. Now it's more of a zero-sum game, where if I win you lose. Factors such as these have been producing results like burnout. 
 
People: It has gotten hard to find someone to love or to really be in love, and we tend to choose the "right" person rather than the person we love.  This is true in our professional life as well, in that we pursue success in society’s terms and not the work that we would really like to do.  Do these ego-denying choices mean that we lose a certain life energy?

Cao Qinglong:  Yes.  Many people who lose their vitality have either chosen the wrong lifestyle, betraying their own fundamental values, or have developed a false image of themselves, selectively amplifying something that completely goes against who they are. Or they have neglected themselves for so long in order to get along in the world that they have never even bothered to take care of their deepest inner needs.
 
People's focus in terms of a partner or getting married is even more determined by things outside of ourselves.  Of course, this is important, because external expectations matter a lot, but they should not be the only considerations.  Marriage has to do with reproduction and money, it has to do intimacy, sex, and the need for emotional empathy, and especially has to do with compatibility as two personalities attach themselves to one another.   You can see it in the divorce rate these days - people are rushing into marriage and then rushing out. They sense that this is not good, that they can’t stand it, that they are like two cogs in a wheel that don’t fit together and are constantly wearing one another down. A bad relationship can thoroughly deplete a person's mental effectiveness

People: What there any consequences of burnout for society and for individuals?
 
Cui Qinglong: On the one hand, it leads people to focus on anything that can alleviate the burnout, anything that brings instant gratification, such as even more self-serving forms of leisure and hedonism. On the other hand, everyone will become increasingly averse to things that amplify the feeling of burnout, things like working hard, getting married, and having children. In the past few decades, these things seemed to be very reasonable choices, but in today’s social context, it becomes something that is not worth doing – I’m already exhausted, so why should I take on something else, why should I try to make someone else’s life work?   If this is how you’re thinking, then all of these things just become more wear and tear.   Burnout completely changes how people view the future.
 
People: You just said that burnout pushes people toward escapism.  Does this mean that people will be even more attracted to short online clips, video games, and other forms of entertainment that give instant feedback?
 
Cui Qinglong: Yes, any diversion along that line that becomes popular is fulfilling a common psychological need. Things like video clips and fast food video games provide constant feedback with a very low threshold. Many people scroll through videos and shows on their cellphones as if they were enjoying themselves, but at a basic level they are not really addressing their psychological imbalance.   My point is not to criticize such behavior, but rather to question the motivation behind it.

Let’s imagine two situations.  In the first, there’s a movie you want to see and you’re in the mood for it today, so you set aside the time for it, and the whole process is satisfying.  In the other situation, you’re feeling anxious or listless, and you want to get rid of these feelings, so you scroll through a bunch of shows or video clips, which only makes you feel all the more irritated and empty, but you can’t stop, even if you’re sort of hating yourself for it. 
 
In fact, people want to stop, because they recognize that there is not much value in this behavior.  Such things were meant to be snacks to fill up bits of time here and there, but if you treat them as a main course and try to devote your attention to them, you wind up feeling useless and angry.
 
People: In your online texts you talk about this kind of instant feedback as a kind of “behavioral downgrade.”  Could you explain this further?

Cui Qinglong: What I mean is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to immerse ourselves in things and focus on matters that require long periods of effort without receiving feedback. Burnout comes from the fact that the feedback you receive in life or work is not sufficient to offset your internal depletion, so you wind up with an imbalance in terms of psychological income and expenditure. A person needs a certain amount of “mental efficacy xinli xiaoneng/心理效能” to do something, which you can understand as the mental capacity and motivation needed to complete the task at hand.
 
For example, if a person is going to write a thesis, they have to read through a ton of literature and put together their overall framework, which requires a relatively high level of mental efficacy to accomplish. So many people will drag their feet. In terms of the numbers, they should be investing two or three hours in careful reading every day, but one day they only to manage to read for half an hour or even just a few minutes, after which they “downgrade” and go do something less demanding, things that do not challenge their concentration or willpower. People are constantly downgrading like this, and when they can't even watch a movie, or an online show, or read a novel, they wind up scrolling through infomercials and [the Chinese version of ] Instagram, which are the most visually attractive and the least demanding in terms of the consumption of cognitive resources, where people get their feedback passively.
 
When people live every day with such a downgraded pattern of behavior, the entire system receives a kind of long-term negative feedback that shapes the system itself into a level of function that essentially says:  “This is all that we can do every day.”   This in turn affects every aspect of a person's life, downgrading our intimacy, our body image management, etc. so that we start to not really care about how we do things, such as how we eat and drink. 
 
People: What can we do to contain this 'downgrading'?
 
Cui Qinglong: Mental effectiveness fluctuates. One thing we can do is physiological adjustment, such as getting enough sleep, and being sensible about exercise and diet, etc. At the same time, it depends on whether we can call on our sense of competence when we need to do something.  For example, if you do something you are good at, which allows you to sense your own ability and value, or your own significance, then you may be able to bring a relatively high level of mental efficacy to this process.
 
I try to write something for my online platform every day, and on a good day I may publish as many as three tweets. Sometimes I'm not motivated and instead am in a downgraded state where I might go read something more relaxing or play a game. This kind of relaxation is necessary, but if I stay in this state of relaxation for a long time, I no longer feel relaxed, because my sense of vitality has diminished as well.
 
In fact, people have a subtle threshold, for example, if my mental efficacy is at level 5, but I manage to do something at level 7, this pushes me into another emotional state. In this state, I can maybe overdraw a bit on my mental efficacy, and actually publish something that had just occurred to me in passing but which I hadn’t really planned to do. When I do this there’s this huge feedback, which suddenly makes me realize that his process has given me a huge sense of accomplishment, because if I overdrew my efficacy by maybe 2 points, I got back 3, 4, or even 5 feedback points, which recharged my batteries. 
 
So when at first you are feeling like not doing anything, but then think, maybe today I’ll get up and clean the house a bit, do a little exercise, and then invite some friends over to get me energized, then as long as the feedback coming in from effort is greater than the level of exertion you put into it to make it happen, it's going to lift you up out of your slump. That's why we always have to pay attention to our mental state and whether our sense of depletion is greater than our sense of gain.
 
People: People often feel useless and incompetent at the end of the day when they realize that they put off what they should have been doing and got nothing done.
 
Cui Qinglong: Repeated self-loathing further exacerbates psychological ego depletion. There is no need to be hard on ourselves when we are simply seeking comfort or granting ourselves a bit of leeway.  If I think I’m at level 1 for mental effectiveness today, then I will only deal with what I can deal with at a level 1 mental state.
 
Human emotions are cyclical. Some people work at high efficiency for a while and then fall into a state of low mood for two to three days or even a week. At this point they have overdrawn their mental effectiveness, and all they want to do is lie down and slowly get better. On the other hand you can be vigilant, and if you start to slowly fall into a diminished state, you can try to mobilize your strength to do something to boost your mental effectiveness (whatever you do, the feedback has to exceed whatever it costs you). This is like slamming on the brakes and staying where you are instead of falling.
 
People: We are often surrounded by 'workaholics' who seem to have a great sense of vitality and continue to work tirelessly.  Does this mean they have plenty of energy?
 
Cui Qinglong: It depends on their inner experience. If this is their work attitude, their sense of efficacy, and if they can stop when their work is done, then this is vitality, and it’s very healthy. Then there are people who can only act this way, out of compulsion or even some kind of manic state, people who are sacrificing their other needs to this, and whose interior states are possibly conflicted or depleted, so that they have to put themselves in a state of forced arousal in order to counteract their internal discomfort. This kind of workaholic is not the embodiment of vitality but is instead defensive and may even be running away from something. 
 
People: As opposed to workaholics, we are also starting to see people who want to avoid competition, as in expressions like “packing it in bailan/摆烂[2],” which used to be pejorative but is now popular.  How do you see this? 
 
Cui Qinglong: It’s because people now feel that it is not cost-effective to struggle and try forge ahead.  Ten years ago, "struggle" and "striving" were very positive terms. Back then, the characters we saw onscreen all conveyed this spirit, and people were attracted to them. But in the past few years, people feel greater and greater hostility to these kinds of people, and even reject them outright, and the spirit that those positive words are trying to convey no longer resonates with the true emotions people are generally feeling.
 
When a lot of people talk about “packing it in,” on the surface it looks like they don’t care, like they are making fun of something, but in fact they care very much about those things.  It’s just that the price they have to pay for caring has gotten out of control.   This attitude merely allows them to temporarily detach themselves – for a moment - from a social machine that only cares about efficiency.  The spiritual instinct of human beings is to try to retrieve their original nature after they have been overly instrumentalized.
 
But even if this attitude expresses the desire to avoid some of this competition, it can't really alleviate the bad feeling of being crushed by society. Because even if you give up, or get out of the race, this must be the result of a genuine choice, and not a choice that has been forced upon you.  When you have two choices, you choose one for a reason, and you could have chosen the other one, if at some cost.  Once you are forced to make a certain choice, it means that the choice is in fact a compromise, something that saps a lot of your vitality and your sense of meaning and leaves you feeling depleted and disheartened.
 
But passive lying flat is also perfectly acceptable, it's a cost-effective lifestyle choice that must be respected. Although not many people really put this into practice, and most of the time it’s kind of a joke, on a spiritual level it has become a power move with which many people attempt to identify and empathize with – the power of giving up. As I've said before, our society increasingly lacks a restart mechanism that will let us pick ourselves up after we fail, a safe space where we can fail and temporarily come clean about out giving up.
 
People: What should a reasonable restart mechanism look like?
 
Cui Qinglong: My idea is based on my experience of playing video games.  The games are designed so that no matter how many times you fail, no matter how difficult a particular task is, you can start over an infinite number of times after failing, and keep going until you win. But in real life, most people can’t do this. People sometimes need to stop for a while, for example when they feel like they just can’t do any more and need to rest and unplug themselves for a while.  There was something on the news lately that caught my attention, an employee of some huge Internet company that died suddenly, and in turns out that his mortgage at the time was more than 30,000 RMB a month [approx. $4200 USD$; according to the Internet, the average yearly salary in Shanghai is 370,000 RMB = 50,800 USD$].  Although this is an extreme case, I believe that it represents a category of people in society who can only keep going because the burden they are carrying is approaching the limit of what they can bear.
 
The restart mechanism would be, pragmatically speaking, fewer working hours, relatively more breaks, no more 996 [i.e., working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week], no more excessive overtime. In a practical sense, this may be hard to do. But our spiritual makeup truly needs a break like this in order to restore our mental effectiveness, which at present is either in an overdrawn state of excessive depletion, or is lying completely flat. If we compare a person to a spring, they should maintain a stable inner tension between tightness and looseness, and this inner tension is the source of their feeling of sustained vitality.
 
We need to value our mental effectiveness and have a clear sense and understanding of the mental load we can carry.  We cannot force ourselves to take on overloads, especially on a long-term basis, which becomes very dangerous.
 
People: There are more and more groups popping up on Douban [i.e., on the Internet], like the "FIRE" group [Financial Independence Retire Early] or the "Bye-bye first-tier city" group. Many people think that once they’ve achieved financial freedom or fulfilled certain conditions, they can leave the city, get rid of burnout, and be free.  What do you think of this kind of "freedom?"
 
Cui Qinglong: It’s true, nowadays many people want to save up enough money to go to a small city and live a life without burnout. It's not a bad option if you can find a new way of life where you can exercise your mental efficacy.  But if it robs you of your connections to society, or the chance to develop your abilities and values, or the conditions you need to live a creative life, it might not be a very good life option.
 
I once blogged that: "A person is most free when they apply the necessary constraints to organize their disordered chaos." This statement has to do with the experience of freedom. I think that the existence of freedom requires certain appropriate restraints, and that the satisfaction that comes from the large swathes of time where we can be free of responsibility, where we can lie flat, entertain ourselves, and relax to our hearts’ content, in fact fades pretty quickly, and we wind up bored, or even empty and depressed. 
 
In the past I’ve run into people who are financially independent, who no longer have to spend any of their time earning financial rewards. But what they end up struggling with is what to do with their everyday lives. If you look at the super rich who retire, they either go into charity or switch to another kind of work, maybe becoming a teacher in a small town, something to anchor themselves in society, because your sense of existence is always dependent on the social structure, no matter what you do.
 
We think of restrictions as constraints, but they give life a certain order, and allow a person not to have to think for themselves, every day, how to use the vast chunks of time before them.  Once you can't arrange your time to create the proper rhythm of tension and relaxation, you can fall into a kind of psychological distress.
 
One can only live within a structure of tension, in which there are pressures but also relaxation, and a proper structure allows for a lasting feeling of a comfortable life. The emotional acceptance of limitations, paired with the ability to set them aside when we wish, is the greatest sense of freedom we can ask for.
 
People: What impact can our original family have on our emotional vitality?
 
Cui Qinglong:  When we talk about those who nurtured us, we are talking about the people who gave birth to us and brought us up, the people to whom we are most attached.   When you look at how children run and play tirelessly, you see that they have a natural vitality, even if this might make you feel that we and children are two separate species.  The speed with which they can call on their vitality is something that adults can hardly imagine, but in fact we’ve all been there.  When I was in elementary school, I would run to school and run back, just moving for the sake of moving, with an energy that never ran out.
 
Every child has the potential to become a very dynamic person, but this potential needs the proper environment. There is a concept in psychology called “mirroring,” which means “validating” or sharing an experience, hence “reflecting like a mirror.” For example, when a child has a positive emotional experience, he needs feedback from the nurturer to make him feel that this feeling is not only his, but also ours, so that it becomes an experience that can be shared with others like him, and he will be able to access it more often.
 
A child who has the experience of continual validation is less likely to fall into self-doubt when they encounter a setback in the future.  They may think that they just chose the wrong method or made a mistake, or that the failure was necessary and that they will just think of another solution.  They won't end up pointing the finger at themselves and feeling incompetent or ashamed. Psychological vitality is really the same thing, in the sense that if a child receives positive feedback for those proud, happy emotional experiences, then they are more motivated to create those experiences, they are happier doing these things, which creates a virtuous cycle. All of this is about a person's sense of vitality.
 
People: If we're feeling tired and burned out now, is it possible to find answers in how we grew up?
 
Cui Qinglong: We first have to determine whether our loss of vitality happened a long time ago, or whether it is just the temporary impact of a bad environment. The two are not the same. Parents can give children certain psychological assets through good parenting, and the environment the child encounters later on in life can also have an impact. Each of us has his or her own store of mental vitality.  For example, if a person has always wanted to lie flat since they were a child, and this impulse has nothing to do with objective pressures from the outside, then this situation is one where total vitality is lacking, just like a 500 mAh battery runs out faster than a 1000 mAh battery. 
 
People: Is it possible for us to modify this setting ourselves?
 
Cui Qinglong: I mentioned a few minutes ago something I call "the renewal of experience," the idea that that the human psyche develops throughout our entire lifetime. This means that what one has put in place over a long period of time can in fact be renewed. If you maintain a mode of life with a sense of effectiveness and value, then a slow renewal of inner experience will take place. The total volume of vitality can then slowly increase.
 
On the other hand, I guess there is what we call “recharging.” A person who is validated by a good friend, or who has done something he or she likes, or who has received support and understanding from their partner, etc., all of these are things that can temporarily recharge us, giving us a relatively high level of mental efficacy for that moment or that day.
 
People: Are there any specific, workable ways that we can recharge ourselves?
 
Cui Qinglong: An effective way is to monitor your life over the long term. Many people's life habits come with a fair bit of chronic depletion. We may find that we are in a state of vitality for a bit, and then in a more depressed state, and we need to think about what we did to access that vitality, in other words, trying to put our fingers on where these feelings are coming from. And similarly, when I’m down, it’s because of something I’ve done and how I see myself.
 
If something gives you more mental energy, then stick with it. For example, I write on my blog every day because I think it's something that keeps me organized internally and it's something I can repeat. By contrast, certain things make me feel depleted.  I used to just lie down and scroll through my cell phone, but I realized that after half an hour, I fell into a persistent state of anxiety, so I stopped doing it.
 
In addition, quality relationships are always the most important. In addition to intimate relationships, regular friendships, or community relationships based on a particular interest are also key. For example, if you participate in something based on an interest or in a book group, then you have a regular forum to share some of your thoughts and engage in meaningful conversations.   And then there are all the things that keep life organized, like to-do lists or daily schedules, but these should not be too strict.
 
It's also important to empty your emotional cache on a regular basis. I usually make myself not look at my cell phone for the first half hour when I wake up in the morning, so that the information flow from the outside world does not intervene too quickly, and I can think on my own about things without the disturbance of outside news, slowly transitioning toward the tasks of the day ahead.   This transition allows me to meet the day with a sense of control and preparedness.
 
In addition, finding a professional and reliable counselor who meets your needs can also be a great help to self-growth.  This may require a change in how people tend to understand counseling, which in this day and age is not something you seek out when you’re sick, but instead a general need that serves most people who are mentally healthy but still want to grow internally.

People: Is it possible for us to actually get rid of burnout and wash it out of our bodies?
 
Cui Qinglong: I don’t think so. We can think of burnout as a mental state that is bound to exist in a healthy person, in the same way that our bodies get old. Burnout is not permanent, and it is not something you can't get rid of, the point is whether it goes away on its own after a certain period. The core of all of this is that we need to be able to maintain healthy regulatory mechanisms.
 
If you get your life in long-term focus, then you can see which things are eating you alive, and that you should get rid of, and which things you should optimize.  What are the things that recharge your batteries, and can you create these things for yourself?  If you can achieve some long-term mental gains and use these to build a lasting, stable structure, to me, that is something practical you can do for yourself.

People: You just mentioned intimacy and community relationships.  Are these the equivalent of giving yourself an external “high-quality recharge?”
 
Cui Qinglong: It’s all mutually beneficial, and almost all psychologists agree that people need relationships throughout their lives, especially high-quality relationships. The idea of a battery pack refers to a situation where two people need one another and thus can mutually recharge.  People have always needed a two-way emotional experience to exist in a stable, relatively organized mental state. In addition, people have always had the psychological instinct to share with those who are closest to them, as well as a desire to tell other people their innermost thoughts and feelings and to have these be understood.  A successful relationship of this kind can be very energizing.
 
People: On the one hand, society encourages positivity and success, and many people pour every last bit of their energy into that; on the other hand, burnout has become a common disease in modern society. How do you see this structural problem? Is it possible for people to truly free themselves from this structure?
 
Cui Qinglong: People are bound to develop negative emotions, bound to slack off, but if the environment expects them to live only in a positive state, that means that when they fail to live up to that standard, they will feel harshly judged by the outside world, and eventually will harshly judge themselves.  In a social sense, it is a good thing to be encouraged to live positively, but this cannot be the whole picture; it is only appropriate to recognize a complete and authentic self and initiate positive actions on that basis.
 
Many of the people who seek me out tell me that when they are in a bad mood, there is always someone around them saying "you should cheer up" or "you need to go do something positive."  And people shut down when they hear these voices.  Why is this?  Because they feel that they are not understood, that there is no outlet for their inner pain, that they cannot share it.
 
This is just like in counseling, where one of the most important things a counselor can do is to really see their patient, to see their experience of being denied by others and even by themselves.  When we are more comfortable with our own shadows, we are better at directing our positive moods toward others.
 
 From a social perspective, we need not only positive guidance, but also empathy and acceptance of the human flaws we find in ourselves and others, including the understanding and acceptance of burnout. The psychologist Karen Horney once wrote a book called The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1927), in which she describes the impact of the environment on personality formation and psychological problems from the perspective of the era and society in which she lived, so perhaps burnout is the “neurosis” of our time. In other words, if a phenomenon is collective in nature, it is likely to reflect the language of the times, a language that in turn needs to be heard, understood, and accepted by human society as a whole, so that it does not give rise to more relational alienation, as well as aggression and hostility.
 
 Notes

[1]崔庆龙, “我们为什么越来越累？” People magazine (Renwu 任务), March 27, 2022.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  The literal meaning of bailian is to admit that something is rotten.  In popular usage in China it means giving up when you know there’s no hope.  So anything along the lines of “throwing in the towel, hanging it up, calling it a day, cutting your losses” conveys the meaning, which is a variant of the more common tangping/躺平, “lying flat.”