China's Self-Help Essay Boom: Stop Chasing Other People's Lives
Scroll through a Chinese content feed on any given morning and you will find a cluster of essays with titles like “What should an ordinary person’s life look like?” and “If you keep staring at other people’s lives, you will never live your own well.” They are not celebrity gossip or breaking news. They are long, plain-spoken reflections on envy, aging and the fear of being unremarkable — and they travel far.
The premise of the most-shared pieces is simple. Social feeds show a parade of people who seem to have bought the car, the apartment and the effortless salary by their late twenties. The reader, meanwhile, commutes on schedule, cooks dinner, supervises homework and checks on elderly parents. One widely circulated essay puts the worry bluntly: many people ask whether a life with no dramatic events amounts to having wasted the trip. Its answer is no — the vast majority of people live exactly this way, and that is not failure.
A companion essay tells the story of a 46-year-old woman in Jinan, Shandong province, whose first half-century, as the author frames it, was ruined by comparison. She reportedly worked at a neighborhood supermarket and spent her evenings inquiring about neighbors’ purchases, pushing her husband to borrow money for a new car after a friend bought one, and stretching credit to match a classmate’s tutoring bills. The details are the kind of composite storytelling common in this genre, but the moral lands: comparison, the author argues, produces anxiety and exhaustion rather than improvement.
Other essays in the cluster take different angles on the same anxiety. One, aimed at readers past seventy, lists six pieces of advice for a long retirement — health first, stop accommodating everyone else — and reads like a letter from a blunt but affectionate aunt. Another asks which day matters most, today, tomorrow or the day after, and scolds readers for forever postponing the visit home or the phone call to a parent. A third argues that changing cities or jobs does not help if the same conflicts keep following you, because the problem is internal.
There is a practical reason this genre thrives in China. The country’s middle class expanded fast, and so did the visibility of other people’s success. Short-video apps and lifestyle platforms turned consumption and family life into public performance, while the cost of housing and education in big cities made upward movement feel slower than it once did. Add an aging population and the pressures of caring for children and parents at once, and the appetite for reassurance is easy to understand.
These essays are not literature, and they rarely pretend to be. They borrow the structure of the sermon: a relatable complaint, a cautionary tale, a short list of resolutions. But they fill a gap that glossy magazines and academic psychology leave open, offering comfort in the second person — you are not alone, and you are not late. That they are consumed on the same phones that generate the envy is an irony the authors mostly skip.
The genre also has a seasonal rhythm. Around Frost’s Descent, the traditional solar term that fell this week and marks the last stretch of autumn, greeting-style posts wishing readers health and peace circulate widely. It is a reminder that much of this content is less about ambition than about steadiness: eat well, sleep, call your mother, stop measuring your kitchen against a stranger’s kitchen.
For global readers, the phenomenon is a window into how Chinese internet users talk about ordinary life. The answer these essays keep returning to is unglamorous: the day you can actually hold is today, and the life worth living is usually the one already in front of you.