‘4,500 days to retirement’: young woman’s days till end of being ‘job slave’ calendar shows Chinese youths’ changing priorities
- A woman’s countdown calendar to her early retirement has inspired many people seeking a life change on mainland China’s social media
- The calendar has resonated with the emerging ‘fire’ and ‘lying flat’ movements among younger generations in China today
A 24-year-old Chinese woman’s retirement countdown calendar has highlighted the rising popularity of early retirement among youth in China.
The woman from central China’s Hunan province, surnamed Deng, made a DIY calendar that counts down the 4,500 days she has before the day of her planned early retirement.
On March 13, Deng posted photos of her tear-off-a-day calendar that showed the number of days “until freedom”, which looked far off judging by the thickness of the calendar pages remaining.
An advocate of the “fire” movement, which stands for “financial independence, retire early”, Deng said the calendar was for the day she had saved enough money to quit her job and become a freelancer. However, she did not specify her profession.
Intended as a documentation of her journey towards “a life with more choices”, Deng said that she also put encouraging messages on every 10th page in the calendar to celebrate her success in getting through another part of her life as a “job slave”.
Deng’s calendar has resonated with the emerging fire movement among younger generations in China today.
The movement first appeared in the West with the 1992 book Your Money or Your Life and encourages people to maximise their savings to achieve the goal of quitting their jobs and retiring decades earlier than usual by living off investment income.
The movement’s rise in popularity in China coincided with the rise of the tang ping concept, which means “lying flat”.
The name refers to changing attitudes towards career and ambition with the goal of not overworking and being content with achieving the minimum required for survival. It is increasingly viewed as a dream lifestyle by many in China due to rising workplace and cost-of-living pressures in recent years.
On the Chinese social media platform Douban, nearly 230,000 people have joined the “FIRE Life” group since it was established in 2020.
While only high-net-worth individuals can usually choose the fire lifestyle, many dissatisfied with modern work culture have achieved what they call “half-fire” – going freelance and having the freedom to decide when to work and how to live.
However, many on Chinese social media had different opinions towards Deng’s calendar, saying the remaining days were “so ‘thick’ that it makes people feel even more hopeless”.
“I’m getting more anxious seeing there’s still such a long time before I could retire,” said one person.
Another pointed out it was more important to live in the moment than counting the days to retirement: “It is not only the calendar that she is tearing off but also her life and youth. Life is for us to experience, not to count in numbers”.
