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Paper short abstract

Analyzing the posts, over five years, by a member of the “Non-Working Club” on Chinese social media Douban, this paper explores how aspirations for a “good enough life” lived outside of employment are articulated and sustained against ambivalence, through an aesthetics of slowness and simplicity.

Paper long abstract

In late capitalist and late socialist societies alike, the refusal of work has increasingly become one of the grounds through which normative aspirations for “the good life” get contested, giving rise to redefinitions of life, work, and self-making. In contemporary China, like elsewhere, digital spaces have been one of the sites through which such transformations have been enacted on an everyday basis, as many quit their jobs to “live in the present.” Contributing to a recent literature on expressions of anti-work and post-resignation accounts on digital platforms, this paper draws on an archive of posts on Chinese social media Douban, to examine the articulation, in written and visual form, of “non-working” lives and selves as desirable modes of being. Analyzing the public, digitally-mediated enactment of “non-working days” by one singular Douban female user spanning five years (2021-2025), I ask how narrating experienced idle time works to cultivate and sustain detachment from normative imperatives, against the ambivalence of subjectivity. In particular, the paper attends to the aesthetics of slowness and simplicity of these online diaries, as they rework normative views of “the good life” into that of the “good enough life,” and constitute an affective public. I will interrogate the role of this online “sociality of detachment” in moments of felt tension between the aspiration to make one’s own time and an occasionally arising sense of emptiness, where the iteration of words and images attract the expression of “envy” (xianmu) as a reaffirmation of life lived to its own (un)productive rhythm.