Gen-Z want to 'rot' at home. What's wrong with that?

Wake up at midday, doom scroll on the sofa all afternoon, eat a vaguely warm takeaway, then go back to bed.

That’s the sum total of the lives of Chinese “rat people”: self-christened Gen Z societal dropouts, who on social media platforms like Weibo and Rednote try to ironically one‑up each other with their feats of inertia. Imagine something along the lines of “You doom scroll from the couch? Tryhard, I haven’t left my bed in days”.

The term went viral after a video from a 20-something woman from Zhejiang province in eastern China, known as @jiawensishi, shared the joys of a day spent doing less than a slug in a coma.

An added layer of coolness aspired to by rat people is their attempt to be the antithesis of smug online creators whose “day in the life” posts brag of an existence so successful, healthy and productive the reader feels utterly worthless by the time they have swiped to the end.

The phenomenon builds on earlier movements such as the “lying flat” trend in 2021, hikikomori in Japan, and is even akin to “quiet quitting” in the west. But rat people take it further: full withdrawal from society to live life online.

Many have blamed the trend on high youth unemployment, with China’s most recent figures of between 16-21%. Housing costs are also going up.

However, this implies that you don’t choose the rat life, the rat life chooses you. Others have instead pointed to the fact that for many Chinese millennials and Gen Zers, their parents can support this kind of lifestyle, thus discouraging them from seeking employment. And many even believe it to be a sort of protest movement against materialism – pushing back against traditional expectations of work, study, and success. As in “Boomers chose the rat race; we choose the rot race”.

When I first heard about them I was surprised only by how surprised people in the west seemed to be. Because you’d be hard-pressed to find someone my age in Britain who hasn’t bed-rotted – a Gen Z term for sitting in bed, doing nothing productive, eating junk food and watching screens. Sound familiar?

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The most extreme examples of rat people, those who go weeks without seeing daylight, are rare. But the markers of the trend – high levels of people not in education employment or training and a youth uninterested in a world outside their beds and screens – are commonplace for those with eyes to see.

The only difference between them and western Gen Zers? At least the Chinese are being honest. While the Chinese youth seem to treat their “rat lives” with a sort of dark irony – acknowledging the grime and turning it into an inside joke – western Gen Zers want bed rotting to be normalised, even destigmatised.

Online discourse about bed rotting abounds: from rebranding it as “soft living”, to those arguing the word “rot” is too negative and that we should instead be treating it as a legitimate “rest” from stress.

It seeps into other conversations too. Last year when some online leftists advocated boycotts of food delivery apps that underpaid workers, there was a backlash from those who argued that many can’t survive without a daily £20 burrito hand-delivered to their door. For them leaving the house or having to do chores was too overwhelming.

So, why this viral trend? We can obviously turn to the classic markers of any discussion on Gen Z: rising diagnoses of anxiety, depression, self-diagnosis through social media and increased use of antidepressants.

Then there’s the matter of reduced opportunities – we rot because there’s no point doing anything else. As in, we won’t ever get a job, so why go through the humiliation of making a Linkedin? Mum and Dad will probably be relieved they only have to finance high electricity bills and a large UberEats tab, rather than paying for a flat in London for their kid to try and network from.

It’s easy to write off the rat people as extremes or bed-rot defenders as ridiculous, but that would ignore the fact that not only has it has never been harder to live in the real world, it has never been easier to live in the digital one. Or more difficult to leave it.

Why, if you saw no prospect of a job or a partner, wouldn’t you embrace the opioid-like comforts of the internet? You never have to cook or clean. If you want to interact with friends you don’t have to put on underwear, and you don’t have to worry about meeting the right partner, because you can literally make an AI girlfriend tailored to your exact physical and emotional specifications. I wish I was joking.