Every Generation Rebels. Here Are 11 Ways This One Does It | 100 Big Questions About Life

“Rebelliousness” makes us ask: in this new era, what do “success,” “fun” and “beauty” actually mean?

If you had to sum up young people in a single word, the word would probably be “rebellious.”

And which generation of young people wasn’t? People love to exaggerate the traits of the generation standing in front of them, forgetting that every year produces a fresh batch of 22-year-olds — and that they themselves were no model of calm at that age. Look back at the pop movements that have since turned into memes and you find the footprints of every generation of the young: anti-war, anti-dictatorship, anti-violence, smashing guitars on stage, driving nowhere in particular down one highway after another, putting flowers in rifle barrels, writing long poems to get out a great pile of “I don’t believe.”

This cohort’s specialty is maneuvering deftly inside consumerism. They were born into it and grew up in it, after all.

Sometimes that maneuvering goes by the name “attitude to life.” Add in relationships — online and off, between people, and between people and institutions — and you might as well call it a worldview.

You can see it across a run of surveys from QDaily Research Lab: “Which merchant gimmicks meant to engage you leave you cold?” “Which corporate attempts to ‘talk to young people’ make you laugh out loud?” “Which parts of the ‘looks economy’ have not won you over?” and more. From products whose only selling point is “as worn by the celebrity,” to share-to-win giveaways and other WeChat-vendor tactics for reeling in customers, to the “life manifestos” in advertising (which, rhyme aside, sum up nobody’s life), quick-witted young people with sensitive radar long ago learned to see through consumerism’s thicket of tricks. To all of it, they say: no thanks.

On a larger scale, what contemporary life calls “beauty” has been shifting quietly with each wave of rebellion. The assembly-line influencer face is no longer the high ground of taste. Young people in China voted for Wang Ju on an idol survival show, liked the Instagram of the “unconventional influencer” Naomi Watanabe, started following evergreen actresses such as Isabelle Huppert; this year The Guardian even reported on South Korean women smashing their cosmetics in protest against “mainstream beauty.” Someone joked that “when we picked Wang Ju, what we were really picking was ourselves,” and in a sense that is right: without the rebellious refusal to follow the worn path, nothing overturns so-called traditional taste.

The recent vogue for the “earthy,” for instance, carries a streak of rebellion in it. Take food videos alone. Cooking tutorials are everywhere, so why did the Huanong Brothers’ “100 reasons to eat a bamboo rat” and Chef Wang Gang’s blunt “a generous pour of oil” — a line that talks half the audience out of cooking at all — break out this year? “It looks delicious” is part of it, but so is “down to earth and genuinely hardcore.” Until then, most cooking videos online went the refined route: composition, a soundtrack, artful plating, and a cat. The point seemed to be less how to cook than a message that this, and only this, counts as living properly. Earthy food videos put on no airs; they offer real warmth, the smoke and clatter of an ordinary kitchen. For young people tired of being told over and over that they should live the way someone else does, a taste for the “earthy” is a small rebellion, a move from polish to rough and charming.

The rebellious streak also shows up in the stubbornness of “the more popular it gets, the less I want to look at it”. “Everyone likes it, so I like it too” proves nothing about being a firework of a different color; “everyone raves about it and I alone hold the line and refuse the sales pitch” — that is nonconformity now. Woody Allen said everyone fell in love with Snow White, while he took one look at the wicked queen and was smitten. Today’s young people match him at the discipline of not following the crowd in their tastes: you chase the trending topic, I mute entertainment news; you play Honor of Kings, I am still feeding my frog son; you watch the hit talent show, I prefer the quiet, unhyped programs; you are hooked on livestreams, I refuse to install Kuaishou or Douyin. That instinctive resistance to any “national craze” is one of the main carriers of the rebellious spirit.

Rebellion today is clearly no longer a list of separate “behaviors” but a continuous, consistent way of living. Having come through the traditional upbringing built on “you had better amount to something” and “look at other people’s kids,” and gone out into the world, we support ourselves financially and stand on our own mentally — and have at last earned the right to disagree, and with it the chance to vote with our feet: as long as I don’t consent, nobody gets to occupy my mind or my attention, and certainly nobody gets my money. Seen this way, real rebellion is a small, personal declaration of independence. Nothing outrageous is required.

But rebellion is never only rebellion. Sometimes it takes another form: self-mocking labels like “corporate livestock” and “salted fish,” or the deflated moods of the “demotivational” and the “Buddha-like.” In our lab’s poll “Why do you like mocking yourself with words like ‘Buddha-like,’ ‘good-for-nothing,’ ‘old fogey’?”, the top answer was: “These words really do describe me — at least some part of them hits my own anxiety or helplessness.” So those moods that look disobedient and insufficiently upbeat come partly from the contrarian urge to talk back, and partly from a mix of anxiety — about the pressure of daily life and about inherited values — and the wish to relieve that anxiety rather than take orders from it.

What does rebellion look like now?

From QDaily Research Lab’s observations, here are 11 forms that today’s rebellious spirit takes:

1. Lifestyle rebellion: smoking and drinking are cool? Not smoking and not drinking is the real statement

As teenagers, out of curiosity, we copied adult gestures and found a swaggering freedom in smoking, drinking and getting a perm. Grow up and you discover none of it amounts to much. Surveys of teenagers in Europe and the United States reach similar conclusions: they stopped thinking smoking and drinking were cool a while ago. For adults, cigarettes and alcohol usually mean unwritten and uncomfortable social rules — the drinking culture of business dinners, the workplace habit of “smoking together to network.” Refusing them means refusing more than a poured drink or an offered cigarette; it takes the nerve to refuse to hold a relationship together through such gestures. Next to a teenager’s posturing love of booze and tobacco, this grown-up version of rebellion is plainly the higher grade.

2. Information detox rebellion: whatever anyone says, I ignore it

The internet gets in everywhere, and young people cannot seal themselves off from it — which is not the same as surrendering control over what they take in. They keep the Moments tab switched off, leave the little red dots unclicked, mute a group chat the moment they join it, turn off the danmaku before starting a video, block chat while gaming, close DingTalk after work. In a world flooded with information, keeping one quiet corner for yourself brings back the pleasure of getting away with something as a child.

3. Ritual rebellion: the simpler the wedding the better, and skipping it is fine too

Rebellion sometimes appears as plain indifference to ritual. In our lab’s survey “How rebellious are you about ‘ritual’?”, more than half of respondents chose “I want a simple wedding, or no wedding at all.” It goes well beyond weddings: shopping ads flying the flag of “love yourself,” advertorials insisting that everyone should own at least one luxury item in a lifetime, the rule that no chopstick may move until the food has been photographed — young people have stripped the magic from all of this empty ceremony. Ritual is not the problem, in other words. The problem is form outweighing meaning.

4. Algorithm rebellion: even when NetEase Cloud Music recommends a song I love, I refuse to save it, in case it decides it understands me and pushes harder

In the age of big data it takes one slip to be “guessed at” by an algorithm. If you would rather not be pitched and marketed to, fighting back calls for some rebellious cunning: deny access to your contacts — “people you may know” is really not necessary; disable cookies in the browser and clear the browsing history regularly; play music on shuffle and alternate “like” and “not interested” to stress how hard your taste is to pin down; if you slip and tap a clickbait headline in a news app, quickly tap several topics you genuinely care about to pull the recommendations back into line.

5. Like rebellion: when do we get an “I don’t like” button?

A Facebook survey found that more than 3 million users wanted a “dislike” button, a wish plenty of people share. Entertainment news you don’t care about: tap. Toxic uplift from Ayawawa or Mi Meng: tap. Someone posting the same selfie face all week: tap. A troll picking a fight in the comments: tap. The like button stopped meaning “like” long ago; “I don’t like” would express the honest thought — no thanks, thumbs down.

6. Rules rebellion: when they say “know the rules,” which rules do they mean?

The “be good” and “know the rules” of a traditional upbringing cannot escape questioning now. When parents hit a child, does the child’s silence count as being good? Telling elders only what they want to hear and holding back your own view — is that being good? Everyone “volunteers” for overtime and I leave the second my shift ends: does that make me someone who doesn’t know the rules? Thirty and still unmarried and childless — also not knowing the rules? What rebellion questions is not only the rules, but the refusal to act that hides behind “we all went through the same thing.”

7. Persona rebellion: give me the characters who won’t play by the formula

After too many meek, long-suffering heroines on television, this year audiences preferred Story of Yanxi Palace, whose lead has a temper and is not to be crossed. The harmless model-student persona no longer carries celebrities through, either; the public figures who win young people over now are the blunt ones, the ones who seem real. A persona, as young people see it, is something you have to work at, while the point of rebellion is to be yourself. Being real matters more than being perfect. Better to let go than to keep up an exhausting act.

8. Viewing rebellion: official couples, step aside — I ship my own

The most internet-native rebellion of all is the viewing kind: ignore the official plot, make your own. In 2017, fan-edited couple videos on Bilibili became a subject of web-wide conversation more than once, the emblematic case being the mashup pairing of Voldemort and Lin Daiyu. Bilibili now hosts hundreds of well-made “Voldemort–Daiyu” edits, with views in the millions combined. Beyond that, viewers worn out by domestic dramas have developed a habit of inventing around the tired plots: the villain who is vicious and says little, the protagonist who dies the moment he acts up, the woman in men’s clothes spotted at a glance, the villains who really ought to attack from both sides when the hero is outnumbered, and The Qualities of a Lady (《淑女的品格》), in which none of the female leads ever marries. The official version gives us no scenes, so we write our own; it gives us no material, so we produce our own. Rebellion, you might say, is productivity.

9. Ambition rebellion: isn’t life just up, and down, and down, and down?

The rise of “demotivational culture” in China is really a complaint about the crude, one-size-fits-all homegrown gospel of the “winner at life.” Nobody enjoys a life hijacked by ambition, least of all once you notice that the road to the summit, for all its flowers, is full of holes. Rebellious young people yank themselves back to reality with a dose of anti-inspirational quips, and what comes out has a strange energy to it — the spirit of seeing life clearly and loving it anyway. “If life deceives you, don’t be sad and don’t be impatient: tomorrow it will deceive you again.” “Sometimes you feel like an idiot. Don’t lose heart — the feeling is accurate.” “Isn’t life just up, and down, and down, and down…?” “If you never try, how will you find out you can do even worse?”

10. Values rebellion: everything comes down to values — isn’t that its own obsession?

Being sick of the demand that everything must line up with the right values is itself a kind of rebellion about values. In the surveys “the insufferable values tribunal” and “what you like least in reading comments”, the second-place answer in each was the same: complaints about the overuse of “positive energy.” A film or a book gets judged not on what is in it, but on whether the author or the work holds the correct values. About this moral-guardian verdict, in which values outrank everything, all we can say is that “correct values,” in the mouth of a self-appointed champion of justice, usually means “values that happen to match mine.”

11. Halo rebellion: can we take off the “selfless devotion” crown already?

A mother must be made strong by motherhood, a teacher is inevitably a gardener and a candle burning itself down, an athlete exists to win glory for the country. Under an identity halo like that, simply judging things on the facts and doing your job well turns into a form of so-called rebellion. To borrow a line from our reader @Te: any occupation is, at bottom, a job, and holding workers hostage with spiritual praise mainly reveals how long they have been underpaid in material terms. Rebellious young people want contracts honored, not sentiment.

Cover image and illustrations by Zheng Shuya.