2025-01-27
32 分钟This is the Guardian.
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go to theguardian.com longread the man making a Business out of China's Burnout Generation by Chang Cheh Li Jiansheng is convinced he has lived two lives.
His first began in 1984 when he was born to impoverished farmers in China's Henan province.
Ambitious and daring,
he took full advantage of the new economic reality that unfolded after the cataclysms of the MAO years.
By 2017, he had secured a family, a house in Beijing,
and a reputation as one of China's most talented young marketing men.
His success, however, came at a cost.
By then, China had become notorious for its 996-work-culture, 9am to 9pm six days a week.
But Li was working something closer to 007, 24 hours a day, every day.
While managing an all consuming media crisis for his employer, a major tutoring company.
He developed insomnia,
heart palpitations and a severe rash that doctors attributed to a flagging immune system.
He wondered more than once whether he might actually work himself to death.
In Lee's telling,
his second life began in 2018 when he left his lucrative job feeling broken and beleaguered.
He treated himself as an experiment in self rescue.