What's Wrong With Young People Sweating the Small Stuff? Maybe They Just Love Life More

Happy New Year! Did you go chasing small-scale high drama today too?

There's a not-so-new term called the first-world problem: a trivial setback or petty annoyance, set against the serious problems faced by developing countries (the third world). Strictly speaking, a first-world problem isn't a problem at all — it is the very definition of a trifle — and yet it's very hard not to mind.

The term first showed up in an academic monograph published in 1979 and began spreading online in its current sense from 2005. Around 2012, the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems took off on Twitter, and Reddit opened an FWP forum for it. Its use climbed so fast that in November 2012 it was added to Oxford Dictionaries Online as one of the year's buzzwords.

Concretely, a first-world problem looks like this:

• Why do I keep hitting Photoshop and iTunes by mistake?! And then I have to wait forever for them to close!
• The first tissue you pull out of a new pack is always torn! So imperfect!
• I finish my yogurt and leave the spoon in the plastic cup — and then it tips over!
• I have nothing to do while I'm on the toilet, so I read the label on the shampoo bottle!
• ……

You can feel the full exasperation of first-world problems in this set of GIFs:

These grumbled-about little things look utterly trivial, but once the new term named them precisely, people suddenly realized: "Hey, that's true! I've had exactly the same trouble."

UNICEF once ran a survey in New Zealand and found that the most common first-world problem there was slow internet. Another survey, in the UK, found that 30 million Britons had experienced first-world problems, and the thing they complained about most was… a runny nose. Ninety percent of them felt that, even with far more serious things going on, it's only human to be bothered by these silly little troubles.

It's much like the cheer that went up on the Chinese internet a few years back for "small, certain happiness." The phrase was a small coinage of Haruki Murakami's, and it first appeared in his illustrated essay collection Afternoon in the Islets of Langerhans, where it described a drawer stuffed with nice men's underwear. It, too, got quoted again and again because it named a common, subtle feeling of quiet self-contentment — until feel-good "chicken soup" writing wore it out and turned it into a self-soothing, self-congratulatory remedy that people now go out of their way to avoid.

This year the QDaily Research Lab ran a series of surveys on all sorts of subtle emotions, scenes and experiences, and we found that the smaller and more trivial the thing, the more it resonates with young people.

Besides "first-world problems," here are some other small things that loom large in young people's days:

Lightweight Life Fears

The modifier tells you what this is. Not the fear of losing someone you love — or the fear of never getting the chance in this lifetime to have someone to lose — but the small everyday panic of, say, "being called by your full name at top volume by your parents."

The QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey called "What Life Fears Have You Run Into?", which collected 4,501 responses. It turned out that, more than life-and-death matters like an insufficient account balance or a girlfriend's "we need to talk," the thing people run into most often is: "Sorry, the username or password you entered is incorrect. Please try again."

You'd like one string of letters to get you everywhere, but every site and app demands its own little tweak: switch the capitalization, add two digits, work in an exclamation point. So you end up hopping between email inboxes, collecting a dozen text-message codes, begging customer service to tell you the meaning of life — and if you happen to have changed phone numbers, you're left facing a verification code that will never arrive, with nothing to do but cry.

In fact, most lightweight life fears come from the phone. In another poll, "What Small Daily Panics Have You Been Through?", we got 5,934 responses. The top three were "waking up to find your alarm never went off" (934 votes), "low phone battery" (569 votes), and "you put your phone on silent and now you can't remember where you tossed it" (523 votes). Beyond those, people also can't help asking heaven and earth, like fools, questions such as:

• When was my last period?
• When was my girlfriend's last period?
• Why do I always find a great show right when a deadline is closing in?
• Did I lock the door? Did I really lock it?!
• Did I clock in just now?
• Did I turn off the air conditioner?
• Wait, where are my glasses?
• ……

Lightweight life fears are of course nothing next to "the landlord of the place you were happily renting suddenly says he's selling," "housing prices go up yet again," "the company can't raise money and the boss skips town," or "your parents fall ill and need minor surgery." Each one is over quickly, but they come so often that the hours add up — a small panic a day, morning and night, year after year.

Variations on "Small, Certain Happiness"

These include the "small, certain helplessness" that electronics bring on, the "small, certain annoyances" of dealing with other people, and the "small, certain idling" and "small, certain vexations" that look a lot like first-world problems. The QDaily Research Lab's surveys on all of these were unexpectedly popular; each drew about 8,000 responses.

The survey "What 'Small, Certain Helplessness' Have You Met in Life?" drew 8,408 votes in all. Of those, 12.7% picked "the charging cable has a loose connection, and no amount of slow angle-adjusting fixes it," while 18.5% settled on "loading or downloading freezes at 99%" as the small, certain helplessness they hit most — a feeling that sits somewhere between a whimper and a scream for help. Another 32 worn-out readers wrote in the comments: "Honestly, freezing at 99% is already a LARGE, certain helplessness."

10,380 people joined the discussion of "small, certain annoyances", and 1,235 of them denounced the pop-up that apps keep throwing at you: "Give us a good review? Rate now or cruelly decline." That, they said, is more infuriating than old-fashioned breaches of public manners like "smoking in an elevator," "talking loudly in public," or "carrying strong-smelling food onto a plane or into a library." 5,758 people voted in the survey on "small, certain vexations": compared with "a fussy client asking for one last fussy revision" at work (6.5%), nearly a fifth (25.3%) found the wretched design of "an outlet that can't take a two-prong and a three-prong plug at the same time" even worse.

"What 'Small, Certain Idling' Have You Done?" received 8,026 responses. 14.6% of bored readers had once filled in every "口" or "0" or "O" printed in a book; 10.6% had absently peeled the film off a phone case, the clothes off a Barbie doll, or the band off a bottle of water; 10.4% said that when a letter or a manuscript appears on screen in a film, they have to pause and read the whole thing; and 9.4% have made Siri beatbox for them. Another poll, "Where Does Your Diligence Actually Go?", drew 6,472 responses, and it turned out that the things people take most seriously are, by and large, these "small, certain idling" activities:

• Peeling the case off your phone in a meeting to admire the phone itself.
• Having to find every hidden item in a game before you can enjoy it.
• Writing a detailed review even for a 9.9-yuan free-shipping item, out of a sense of civic duty to give your fellow broke shoppers something useful to go on.
• Picking one shot out of dozens of selfies, spending two hours editing it, posting it to Moments as if it were nothing, then spending a whole day reading the compliments.
• I feel like I've seen this word somewhere? No problem, my browsing history is only twenty pages long, let me go find it.
• You have to turn to the very last page of the search results, or you'll always feel you missed something important.
• Wiping out every unread-message badge on your phone.

Almost everyone has these small feelings and subtle experiences, but only when someone else describes them do we throw up our hands: that's me, that's me! So I'm not the only one who thinks and does this.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London argue that emotion has to do with brain structure and so on, of course, but that the act of naming an emotion matters too. Once a feeling has a name, you notice it more often, and its effect on you starts to feel more manageable. We've compiled two lists of subtle feelings that are hard to describe but have names of their own — worth a look later.

Small-Scale Blows of Mass Destruction

These come mostly from urban life services and online shopping. On the whole the city and e-commerce treat us well, but the blows these small inconveniences land hurt no less than a little breakup that fate seemed to have arranged.

The QDaily Research Lab's poll on "Small, Certain Hassles of City Life" received 3,480 responses. The top three hassles were: "you want to buy some daily necessities, but the supermarket is far, the convenience store doesn't stock everything, and an online order won't reach the free-shipping threshold" (394 votes); "you can never find decent transport for the 1.5 kilometers from the subway station to home" (480 votes); and, with 700 votes, "have a package sent home and you worry no one will be in; send it to the office and you worry it'll arrive on a weekend" — the courier calls to interrogate you, like an ex-boyfriend with no feelings, about why you're out again, refuses to ring the buzzer because people in your building get angry if he rings at random, and finally says he's busy, no time to chat, he'll come back another day……

Clever businesses are already working on some of these hassles. But solve the main problem and adorable, sharp-eyed young people will find a hundred secondary ones.

Couriers can now leave your package at a convenience store, for instance — but the store is across the road, off your way home, and once you're home you can't be bothered to go back out for it. Worse, all you want is a roll of toilet paper, and you have to wait in a long line: wait while the person ahead picks out twenty pieces of oden, wait while they slowly dig out their phone and open the payment QR code, wait while the cashier asks for the hundredth time whether they'd like to add five yuan for a yogurt — until you crack.

Or take shared bikes, meant to solve the last kilometer home. Every time you come out of the subway, either there are no bikes or all ten of them are already reserved. You scan until your phone dies and still haven't got one moving. You finally find one with no owner, scan the code, and it tells you it's under repair — you see, one more small-scale blow of mass destruction.

The QDaily Research Lab also ran a survey called "These Days, What Blow Is as Cruel as a Little Breakup Arranged by Fate?". From the 7,130 votes it received, we found that the cruelest blows all belong to the category of "I have the money ready and I can't spend it, and it's killing me" —

• You queue for ages, and the person right in front of you buys the last of what you wanted: a bolt from the blue, a little raincloud over your head, cold sleet slapping your face.
• You go to check out and your size or color is gone; you spent a month agonizing over what to buy for Singles' Day, and a second past midnight it's all snapped up. If I'd known, why bother in the first place — the lesson is too painful to accept.
• A restaurant you'd been dying to try closes before you ever get there. I don't understand: why do I always meet the right person at the wrong time?
• You're buying film tickets, and after comparing prices you turn back to find the seat you'd picked is gone. Once you've seen the sea, no other water will do — if the best seat was ever available, every other seat is settling, and I do! Not! Want! To settle!
• In pouring rain you finally get an Uber, and the driver says he isn't coming, please cancel. You fall in love with a snack, and the convenience store drops it. Not even star-crossed lovers torn apart could top this.

On the whole, this generation of young people looks far more idle than our parents' generation (though even the QDaily Research Lab insists this must be an illusion), and fussier than any consumer before them (that part is true) — or, put another way, much harder to fool.

Partly this may be because living standards are better and there's nothing more urgent to worry about, so young people have grown picky about every product and service. They're broadly satisfied, but once a service solves one main problem they find more secondary ones, and the "IWWIWWIWI" mentality — I want what I want when I want it — keeps getting worse: the moment a need appears, they want it met on the spot.

Ten years ago, when the first online music players arrived, people learned they could hear a new song at once without buying a record. Search engines and Wikipedia could answer your question at three in the morning. Social networks let people curl up on the sofa and trade jokes with friends without ever seeing them. Watching a series on television was too slow, so many dropped cable for the binge on streaming. And Amazon thoroughly trained users to expect that anything they bought would arrive the next day.

The online marketing expert Neil Patel points out that, psychologically, people are impatient by nature because they follow the principle of satisfying themselves as fast as possible — and that businesses today, to hold on to consumers, will meet those wants without limit. So that's what's really going on: because we humans are born wanting it right now, traditional upbringing has always told us to be patient and wait; and now businesses, to please consumers, are supplying thoughtful service without limit, making life feel full of conveniences and letting you feel what it's like to be spoiled.

And we know that being spoiled usually breeds not gratitude but: "Aren't you supposed to be thoughtful? Then hurry up and fix these last few inconveniences for me, or I'm going to cry."

The other part may be the quarter-life crisis of missing life's scheduled targets — getting residency, buying a home, finding a partner, having a child — plus the empty-nest feeling of living alone in the city and how hard it is to reach any peak. That may be one more reason young people strategically shift their attention to small, subtle feelings and go looking for placebo-like small successes and small financial freedoms.

In the QDaily Research Lab's survey on "small successes", 17.2% said that recovering a forgotten password was worth patting yourself on the shoulder and saying "well done" — which lines up neatly with the number-one lightweight life fear.

Life isn't easy, and "making a whole lot of money" is a goal you have no idea how to start on. But small financial freedoms — "walk into a convenience store, grab whatever snack you want with your eyes shut, and pay," "order delivery without checking the discount or the delivery fee," "buy a full year of video-site membership" — don't look nearly as hard.

Young people minding these subtle irritations and pleasures, demanding a higher standard of service, and enjoying a bit of "small-scale high drama" is not, in the end, something bad that needs a lecture about standing taller and seeing further. It can look like making trouble out of nothing, but from another angle it's simply what comes with taking life seriously.

Cover image by: Lin Xiaoyao

QDaily Research Lab* is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all kinds of lifestyle questions — a shift or a trend in how people live, or the service of a particular brand. Here you can vote, vent, and say what you think.*