Through the Internet, many college students use it to refer to irrational internal competition or "voluntary" competition. Now it refers to the phenomenon that peers compete for limited resources and make more efforts, which leads to the decline of personal "income-effort ratio", which can be regarded as "inflation" of efforts.
Of course, you may not understand this. Let me explain what the "involution" of the story is. It is said that there is such a small town. There are many shoe stores in the town. These shoe stores open every morning 10, take a lunch break from noon 12 to 2 pm, and continue to operate from 2 pm to 6 pm. It is open for 5 days every Monday to Friday and closed on weekends. On the hottest days in summer and the coldest days in winter, shoe store owners will close their stores one after another and spend the winter and summer vacations. Over the years, the permanent population of the town has not changed, and the quality and supply of shoes are stable. Therefore, the relationship between supply and demand of shoes in the town has been in an almost perfect balance.
Then one day, the family moved from a small town to a big city and opened a shoe store. This family from a big city is famous for their diligence and hard work. Their shoe store opens at 7: 00 every morning without a lunch break and closes at 1 1 in the evening. It is also open on weekends, and summer and winter are just "winter and summer vacations". People in small towns can buy shoes at any time, so their shoe store business is obviously better than other shoe stores in small towns, and the business of other shoe stores is gradually declining.
However, the owner of the town did not give up. They follow the working hours of shoe stores in big cities, working 7 days a week and 16 hours a day. Their "diligence" has also been "rewarded": their business income has returned to its previous state.
What changes have taken place in town life at this time? Because the population of the town has not increased and the demand for shoes remains the same as before, the final operating income of each shoe store has not changed and will not increase. But the business hours have changed from 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, to one day 16 hours, 7 days a week.
In other words, their working hours have become longer, but their income has not increased. This is the legendary involution.
Consequence of involution: 1, which makes everyone bear more pressure. The involution of work leads to the increase of work pressure and the decrease of work efficiency of all employees. The involution process, which was originally started for a better job, turned into the helplessness of bad money driving out good money, which also doubled the pressure on all of them.
2. Disrupted people's life rhythm. This is a very common phenomenon at work. If someone comes to work half an hour early in the morning, it won't be long before everyone comes half an hour early. However, different people have different sleep times, and this arrival of half an hour in advance is likely to completely disrupt some people's life plans.
3. It has affected the wage growth of migrant workers. It's also a job. Some people think 5000 is ok, while others think 3000 is ok. A job that was originally worth 5,000 yuan will gradually become a job worth 3,000 yuan in this process.