Brutal competition where everyone works harder but nobody gets ahead — the exhausting treadmill of modern life that produces burnout, not progress.
内卷 (nèi juǎn) is what you call it when everyone's working twice as hard but nobody's actually getting anywhere. It's the treadmill at maximum speed — exhausting competition that produces no real progress. Students grinding 16 hours a day not to excel but just to avoid falling behind. Workers burning out not for career growth but to keep their jobs in an oversaturated market. The system itself isn't improving; everyone's just running faster to stay in place.
The phrase started as dry academic jargon in 1963 — anthropologist Clifford Geertz describing economies trapped in stagnant cycles. Chinese economists borrowed it in 2000 to analyze rural labor patterns. Then COVID-19 lockdowns hit in spring 2020, and millions of young Chinese people stuck at home, staring down brutal job competition and 996 work schedules (9am-9pm, six days a week), repurposed the term. It exploded across social media as the perfect word for what they were living: endless hustle with diminishing returns.
What makes 内卷 resonate globally is the feeling it captures — that creeping sense that you're trapped in a game where the only way to not lose is to sacrifice everything, but winning isn't actually possible. It's both diagnosis (the system is broken) and confession (I'm stuck in it too). When young people say it now, there's dark humor in the acknowledgment: we all see the trap, but we're still running.