is it, or are we experiencing what the Chinese are referring to as involution?

> https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i...

> The Chinese term for involution, "neijuan", began trending online in 2020 and was initially used by young people to describe the hypercompetitive and often self-defeating pursuit of traditional markers of success. Some of the contexts they used it in included questioning what was the point of working hard to get into a good school if the reward was working 996 hours (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week) in a tech company? If you were lucky enough to land a job, that is, in an era of high graduate unemployment.

> Though the term is far less commonly used in English, involution comes from a latin term which means "to roll or turn inwards". It was popularised by American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1960s - in relation to his studies of Javanese agriculture - to describe economic or cultural stagnation despite increasing complexity or effort.

> More recently, neijuan has become shorthand in China for the exhausting but also often futile and sometimes self-destructive grind of hyper-competition more broadly.The concept is now also linked to the country’s pivot from property-driven growth to an industrial complex encompassing a third of global manufacturing, which has seen more recources invested without any accompanying increase in returns. It's a race to the bottom.