China's Lying Flat Generation

China's Lying Flat Generation is one man's own account of four years, 2022 to 2026: how he left the city, how he came to live in a seaside town the Chinese call a ghost town, and how by the fourth year he began to feel that nothing had a point. It begins on a bus in Beijing in July 2022, and the move comes that October, with no plan beyond the first winter. He had not set out to make a statement. He only meant to stay a year and see how it went. He stayed four. There is no manifesto in it and no advice. A month's rent in the city buys two years here — that was the arithmetic that started it. There is a flat at 3,500 yuan a year, a budget of about a thousand a month, four winters of wind off the Yellow Sea, one record snowstorm, low tides, jellyfish, barnacles, a landlord who will not fix the gate, a mother on the phone. He writes down what the day cost and how it went, and notes the days he speaks to no one, and lets them stand. He did not find freedom. He says so plainly — he simply stopped being afraid.