Why China’s young are ‘pretending to work’ amid a surge in unemployment

A generation of young workers in China is getting dressed, leaving home, and clocking a full day at public libraries or mock offices. There is no employer. There is no official paycheck. There is a routine that looks like work because it is work, just not yet attached to a contract. The chorus online calls it pretending, yet the mechanics underneath look familiar to anyone who has ever built a company with more doubt than pipeline.

What looks like theater is often scaffolding. When the market does not give you structure, you build your own. When status is missing, you borrow environment, peers, and pacing to force momentum. That is the core lesson for founders in slow demand cycles. You cannot will revenue into existence, but you can design a daily system that produces artifacts, creates signal, and preserves identity until the next inflection arrives.

The cultural headline says this is a cousin to lying flat, a posture of opting out. The behavior says the opposite. People are recreating the four ingredients that make work feel real, even when the economy says not yet. Place, peers, pacing, and proof. Get those four aligned and energy flows. Misalign them and attention drains into doomscrolling and self doubt.

Place is the container. It raises the cost of distraction and lowers the activation energy to begin. A public desk does not solve your portfolio, yet it removes the thousand small frictions that keep you from starting. Peers are the ambient pressure. Silent proximity to focused people makes procrastination feel noisy. Pacing is the clock you borrow from a commute. Arrival at nine, a lunch at one, a reset at three, a review at five. Proof is the visible trail of output at the end of the day, not a mood about effort but a thing you can show a client or yourself.

This is where most founders break the system. They confuse time in seat with throughput. They overweigh outbound volume and undercount contact that changes probability. They present the deck count and forget the learning rate. Hours, resumes sent, meetings booked, posts published. These are all seductive false positives. They look active while your model quietly loses energy. The only numbers that matter in a thin demand environment are artifacts shipped, conversations that change someone’s belief, and skill deltas you can demonstrate.

If you strip the trend down to its mechanics, you get a loop that any early team can adopt. Scaffold, Signal, Ship. Scaffold is the designed constraint that makes work more likely than drift. Pick a place where starting is cheap, decide your day in advance, and turn off choices that do not help you begin. Treat environment as a feature, not an afterthought. Signal is the accountability layer. It can be public, like a daily publish, or private, like a check in with a peer at four in the afternoon. It must be observable and it must create an honest consequence for not doing the work. Ship is the daily close. Something leaves your laptop and enters the world. A proposal, a micro prototype, a research memo, a cold email that is not generic but specific enough to be useful to a real person.

Mock offices that rent desks without employers look odd only if you think work is a contract. Founders know work is a pipeline. These rooms provide the same three functions a good accelerator does on a slow day. They compress distraction, they substitute peer energy for missing market pull, and they require a narrative about what you did today that is not an excuse. That is valuable for a nineteen year old selling kittens online, and it is just as valuable for a mid career consultant who needs six uninterrupted hours to write something difficult.

There is also a family systems angle that early leaders should not ignore. Identity is social. People often need a visible ritual that signals legitimacy to parents, partners, and to themselves. A badge, an office, a commute. When those are gone, routines fall apart. The pretend to work trend fills that gap with design choices that feel performative from the outside but function as psychological safety from the inside. If your team has gone remote or if you run a distributed company, you need to supply a credible substitute. Do not just tell people to be adults. Give them agreed check in windows, ready made focus blocks, and an artifact review that is kind but firm.

The distinction between theater and throughput matters. Theater optimizes for how work looks. Throughput optimizes for how value moves. The line is thinner than people think. Sitting in a room of silent peers can be theater if the day ends with nothing shipped. A public publish that lands in front of a future buyer is throughput. A study session becomes throughput when it results in a certification that changes price. A mock sales call becomes throughput when the script gets tighter, the objections are catalogued, and the next call converts faster.

If you lead a small team through a dry quarter, treat this trend like a lab manual. Start with place. Pick a room that everyone can reach, even if it is virtual. The room must reduce cognitive switching, not increase it. Next, define the daily motion that fits your funnel. Mornings for inputs like research and prospecting, early afternoon for outputs like proposals and code, late afternoon for reviews that generate learning and alignment. Close with proof. Ask for one artifact per person per day that a buyer, partner, or future hire would recognize as useful. Keep the bar realistic so the loop repeats.

Avoid the common trap of adding ceremony without consequence. Many teams copy standups, weekly demos, or OKRs because they seem mature. Without enforcement and real decision rights, these rituals turn into performance art. A better approach is to assign clear ownership outcomes per person, plus a short narrative that explains what changed this week. The narrative is how you force learning. It is also how you prevent the quiet erosion of morale that follows many small empty wins.

There is a risk side to this behavior that leaders should manage with care. Self imposed pressure can keep you moving, and it can also grind you down if the scoreboard never updates. The antidote is to track progress on two planes. The external plane contains pipeline and cash. The internal plane contains skill growth and process quality. When the external plane stalls, the internal plane is the one that keeps identity intact. If your team can see their craft get sharper while the market stays cold, the system survives.

Another risk is the seduction of quantity. In slow markets, volume feels like a plan. You count resumes, outbound messages, content posts. Volume has its place, but only if it rides on top of a learning loop. That loop should produce adjustments that make the next ten messages smarter than the last ten. If nothing about your next set changes, your volume is not strategy. It is self soothing.

The pretend to work trend also highlights a hiring signal that deserves attention. People who design their own structure usually perform well in early stage teams. They bring energy that is not dependent on constant managerial stimulus. They also respect process because they had to build it. When you interview, ask candidates to walk you through a time when they created their own operating rhythm. You are not looking for grind. You are looking for design.

There is a final founder truth sitting underneath all of this. In the early days, your company will have long stretches where the world gives you nothing back. No investor feedback that helps, no customer reply that lands, no headline that moves your category. Your job in those stretches is not to conjure a miracle. Your job is to install a loop that converts lonely hours into shipped proof and sharper skills. People will call it pretending. You will call it Tuesday.

The macro environment will warm up again. It always does. When it does, the teams that kept shipping during the quiet season move first. Their proposals are tighter, their product is less fragile, their sales scripts already carry the objections they have heard a hundred times. They do not need to relearn how to work in public because they never stopped. They kept the four ingredients aligned. Place gave them a container. Peers gave them pressure. Pacing gave them a clock. Proof gave them identity.

So yes, the pretend to work trend makes for easy jokes. It also reveals the operating truth that separates survivors from spectators. You cannot control demand on a given Tuesday. You can control your loop. Most founders do not need another deck. They need a tighter system that ships something useful every day.