Everything Can Be an -ology Now. Why Not Take Up These 21 New Ones? | 100 Big Questions About Life

How many of these have you mastered?

We have all heard the suffix "-ology," and its Chinese equivalent xué, "the study of," more times than we can count. As a rule, any word lucky enough to take one of them is instantly made to look harder than it is. "Writing" and "numbers" are small, plain words, but "literature" and "mathematics" sound like they arrive with several heavy volumes attached. Dream of the Red Chamber is one book and Eileen Chang is one person, but "Redology" and "Zhangology" summon a whole crowd of names and academic theories. "Success" and "thick face, black heart" describe, at most, how a single person behaves; "success studies" and "Thick Black Theory" are large-scale performance art, complete with quotations from famous people, tearjerker anecdotes lifted from digest magazines, and 100,000-plus pageviews. Whatever earns the suffix is never going to be easy to understand.

But just as the internet decided that everything can be cute, and, as we have written before, that everything is worth a good rub, the past few years have brought us the age of "everything can be an -ology" — in plain terms, anything at all can be turned into a field of study.

Take "Baixue," or White-ology, which was popular in anime and gaming circles a few years back. It came out of a game called White Album 2: players picked apart the plot and the characters' state of mind as earnestly as if they were sitting a reading-comprehension exam, argued without end, and thereby raised the whole thing to the rank of a discipline. Enthusiasts were teased as "Baixue scholars." Closer to the present, the past few months' popular "Liuxue," also known as Sixology, works much the same way: it began as a dig at one veteran performer and, passed from hand to hand, turned into a mass meme in which "Liuxue scholars" copy and paste "blossoming on both fronts" all over the internet. Add the "xuanxue," or mysticism, invoked to explain lottery odds; the "Weibo studies" that teach you the correct way to repost, comment and like; the "internet anthropology" devoted to observing the variety of online crowds; the "fandom economics" that studies how fans vote and campaign for their idols. In short: anything today that carries a whiff of worldview or method, anything that can be examined or imitated from several angles, can be called a study.

Once you see this, you may be pleased to find that the platitude you heard as a child — pay attention and you will find knowledge everywhere — turns out to be reasonable enough. Dig deep enough and every question in the world really can be handed over to some discipline or other; the disciplines simply differ in prestige and in name. Someone may have planted a flag on the big ones already, but the smaller territories still leave plenty of room to work with. Someone unusually good at tidying a room can call it organizing studies. Someone unusually good at writing work emails can call it work-email studies. Someone unusually good at pinning the blame on teammates in a game may as well call it blame-your-teammate studies. Every field is an original discipline, and whoever invents one first may end up a "pioneer of xx-ology," a title every bit as fashionable as "folk scientist" or "feral philosopher."

To broaden everyone's thinking and turn up research areas in daily life you may never have imagined, we decided to apply the spirit of inventing an xx-ology — call it Xueology — to every corner of life. Here are 21 contemporary sub-disciplines we have observed and set down, in three levels of difficulty. Enroll at will.

Beginner Level

1. Lemonology: Faced with a situation where someone else has what you lack, promptly produce the three-word incantation "I'm sour," which conveys with precision that subtle, petty-but-frank feeling of "I'm jealous, and I'm not afraid to say so." A branch of contemporary internet psychology, applicable without discrimination to any occasion where the other person is better than you and you simply cannot bring yourself to say a kind word. Unmatched at talking yourself out of an awkward spot.

2. Lucky-Dogology: A new online discipline derived from mysticism. Its researchers specialize in not really believing they can win anything, yet always finding a logic that talks them into reposting anyway. It has its own fish-shaped totem, the koi, and mascots, usually women, who are updated at irregular intervals.

3. Eyes-Meetingology: A very small branch of social-anxiety studies, devoted to the fear of meeting someone's eyes in a hallway. No universal trick has been found. The most authoritative method so far, reportedly: at under ten meters, one glance to see how things stand; at three meters, a second look, this time with an expression on your face; then you can pass each other in peace. Before taking this course, though, you must first pass the prerequisite in expression management, so that a sudden raised eyebrow and strained grin does not frighten anyone.

4. Taobaology: Full name, applied Taobaology; the discipline of forcing Taobao to work as a search engine. Practice areas include treating product descriptions as Weibo posts and learning new concepts and new words from them; treating item detail pages as Baidu and picking up a small encyclopedia of how household objects are used; and treating customer service as Zhihu and putting competition-math problems to them. Very friendly to those hopeless at practical life. If you fear that studying it will get you hooked on online shopping, consider instead a related practical discipline with different props and a similar technique: Moments studies.

5. Dajiangyouology: Melon-eating studies, for those on every social platform and forum who call themselves the melon-eating masses — bystanders snacking on other people's gossip. Once past the basics there are several tracks for further study: plot-twist studies, side-picking studies, hard-evidence studies and smoothing-it-over studies, whose slogans are, as the names suggest, "wait for the twist," "demand hard evidence," "take no side" and "both of them are in the wrong." All four schools have taken in plenty of melon scholars, and competition among them is fierce.

6. TV-Seriesology: A fast-growing field these past two years, itself divided into several secondary disciplines. The first is trailer studies, which examines whether a trailer is painful to look at, whether the cast trips any alarms, and whether the marketing copy carries bad-show warnings such as "China's first-ever xxx." The second is risk-management studies, which weighs whether a show deserves a paid membership, a viewing at 1.5x speed, or abandonment in favor of a few clips on Bilibili. The third is trauma-repair studies, which decides, once you have been diagnosed with terrible-drama PTSD, which old classic you should rewatch to rinse your eyes.

Suit-Yourself Level

7. Single-Serveology: Living alone or with roommates is only the surface. The real substance of this discipline is handling everything that comes in single servings — how to pick a restaurant suited to eating alone, how to keep your wits and not overbuy at the supermarket by yourself, how to rent an apartment on your own without being fleeced by the agent. It overlaps somewhat with the currently fashionable single-life studies.

8. Haoyangmaology: The art of milking a discount, a comprehensive, practical discipline drawing on language, competition math, logistics and law. Its content may include which credit card yields the most points and perks; how many friends you have to rope in to drive a group-buy price as low as it will go without ending the friendships; and which promotion rules and spend-and-save thresholds deliver the biggest bargain. If the subject interests you, the annual unified exam falls on Singles' Day, November 11.

9. Personaology: The study of curated personas, a discipline with a high adoption rate and an equally high failure rate. It has a complete basic methodology: long legs are labeled "aloof," a high nose bridge gets "dominant," clumsiness becomes "adorably dim," and anyone with no distinguishing feature at all is issued "hardworking" or "foodie." It began in anime fandom and is now spreading to animals (cats, say) and to inanimate objects (robot vacuums, say).

10. Meetingology: The point of this discipline is looking prepared and in command. The behavioral school distinguishes itself with moves such as announcing at the top of the meeting that you must be out by two; slowly repeating what someone else has just said; being the first to call a halt when an argument gets heated; and pacing in circles around the conference room. The PowerPoint school takes its own path, with dark backgrounds and white text, fonts sized to shout, Google-style hand-drawn animation, and the indispensable "one more thing."

11. Let-It-Gology: The study of letting yourself off the hook, a fusion of Buddhist-lite detachment, defeatist sang culture and otaku culture, whose slogan is "life isn't worth the trouble." Practices include "I made no progress today and I am still sleeping soundly," "I'm on a diet but I'm still having the bubble tea," and "if this dream won't work out, I'll change dreams." The governing principle: whatever happens, cheer up, that is the right answer.

12. Bracketology: One school within chat-punctuation studies. It holds that parentheses are how you stage the little drama going on in your head: a single unclosed bracket for "(muttering under my breath"; two unclosed brackets for "(heavy fog (scratch that"; a bracket placed up front for "(runs over) how are you"; or asking and answering yourself, "want to get dinner? (sure)." You can of course use the same logic to guess at what the other person is thinking. Beyond it, there are the space school, the exclamation-point school, the ellipsis school and the period school to choose from.

13. Readingology: "Further reading" studies, the contemporary summit of doing-nothing studies and, if you insist on classifying it, an offshoot of Taobaology. The goal is to turn every "quick look at my phone" into three hours gone without your noticing. The trick is simple: the book you are reading mentions another book, so you look that one up and read a bit; the new book mentions a third, so you look that one up too. This blogger is beautiful, click into her page; oh, her best friend is beautiful as well, click into that page; this shirt looks good, place the order; the bag recommended underneath looks good too, place another one.

14. No-Recommenderology: The exact opposite of the last one. Devoted to outwitting the algorithm, its methods include not opening product pages casually, not liking short videos casually as they scroll past, not logging into a shopping account until you actually order, and disabling cookies in the browser. The pride of the discipline is being able to say that your phone still has no idea what you like.

Vast-and-Profound Level

15. Gangology: The study of contrarian nitpicking — an internet literary form defined by leaving your opponent speechless within a single sentence. The entry level ("Am I the only one who thinks," "What's your real motive here," "The blogger was definitely paid") is easy enough to pick up, but advanced Gangology scholars must move nimbly and, at the right moment, deploy the flawless logic of "argue reason and I'll say you have no heart; argue feelings and I'll say you have no sense" — leverage enough to pry up the planet. It has a sister discipline, Anti-Gangology, which has never kept pace and remains at the beginner level to this day.

16. CEOlogy: Also called Founderology. It covers such sub-subjects as imaginary cooking (dangling made-up rewards in front of employees), storytelling (never the same story twice), workplace newspeak ("empower," "vision," "gray rhino," "occupy the user's mind"), and social-media crisis PR (how to post an apology on Weibo). A secondary discipline of entrepreneurship studies, best taken together with Meetingology above.

17. Online-Anthropology: Field-guide studies. Its true founder is probably the television series Tokyo Girls' Field Guide (《东京女子图鉴》), but by now too many field schools — "Beijing Girls' Field Guide," "Shandong Boys' Field Guide," "Chinese Actors' Field Guide," "Middle-Aged and Elderly Netizens' Field Guide" — hold their own hilltops. Combine it with beginner Personaology's "every Douban user is a literary youth," "every Zhihu user earns a million yuan a year" and "every Weibo user lives for gossip," and you get the contemporary people-watching studies we mentioned at the very start.

18. Nianology: The study of getting through Chinese New Year, a required course for young people today and, in difficulty, on the order of advanced calculus. It is closely related to Single-Serveology, and its classic topics include how to handle your parents' many variations on "get married already," how to answer relatives' questions correctly at the family gathering, how to mock the Spring Festival Gala gracefully, and how to shake off post-holiday syndrome. Its main doctrines include "go home often, but do not stay long, or your mother will tire of you" and "buy everything two weeks before the holiday, or the couriers may stop delivering."

19. Fandomology: Rainbow-fart studies, the art of extravagant praise, and an advanced school of internet literature. Like mutual-flattery-in-business studies, it is fundamentally about praising people, but its diction has to be far more heartfelt and far more eloquent. Good-looking becomes "a genius of a face"; an overdone expression on camera becomes "what kind of god-tier acting is this"; an outstanding air becomes "thank you for the trouble of descending to our world." One of the basic skills of fan culture. Friends from outside the fandoms may find it uncomfortable at first, but once you have it, there is, literally, nothing you cannot praise to the skies.

20. Zhongdianology: Highlight-the-key-points studies, another school of internet literature, whose specialty is using hints like "here's the key point" or "listen up, class" to get through a block of text as fast as possible. The beginner level is taking in ten lines at a glance; the intermediate level is going to the comments to find whoever has already summarized it; the advanced level is leaving the single comment "too long, didn't read."

21. No-Fake-Dataology: Data-dehydration studies, an internet mathematics for handling every number in daily life that looks less than trustworthy. Common formulas include "an 80-episode series: divide the actual plot by two," "a traffic star's Weibo reposts: knock off a zero for the number of real people," and "film ratings: seven is a pass, eight means it is actually good." Its one shortcoming is that the discipline has no unified theory and suits only those friends with long experience surfing the internet.

Images by: Zheng Shuya