The Age of Incense: A Generation's Quiet Retreat

Between work and getting ahead

In the spring of 2023, a set of figures circulated on social media: bookings for temple attractions on Ctrip and Meituan had more than tripled year on year, and nearly half of the visitors were born in the 1990s or 2000s. Those seeking the first incense offering of the day at Beijing’s Yonghe Temple had to queue before dawn. Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou briefly sold out of its eighteen-seed bracelets. The peak season at Mount Wutai, Mount Putuo, and Mount Emei arrived a full month early. Meanwhile, tarot-card sales on major e-commerce platforms quadrupled in two years; mini-programs generating bazi charts counted tens of millions of monthly active users; MBTI grew from an abbreviation in psychology into a form of social currency—the opening line of a self-introduction changed from “what I do” to “I am an INFP”; and a mobile app called “Digital Wooden Fish” conquered an entire generation with its absurd simplicity: tap the screen, hear the wooden fish, gain one point of merit.

A sentence sprouted like a seed from the internet’s humus and quickly became the most precise self-mockery of the age:

“Between working and working my way up, I chose to offer incense.”

Beneath the laughter lies a precise cost-benefit calculation. The returns from working are shrinking: real wage growth is slowing, the crisis at thirty-five hangs overhead, and layoff news updates daily. The route to getting ahead is narrowing: postgraduate entrance-exam registrations rose from 2.9 million in 2019 to 4.38 million in 2024 as admission rates continued to fall; applications for the national civil-service examination approached four million, with nearly a hundred people competing for one post. Offering incense, by contrast, costs almost nothing. Its return may be imaginary, but at least no one receives an email at the censer saying, “Thank you for your participation. You have not passed this round.” When conventional routes of advancement are congested almost to paralysis, people need somewhere to place their hopes for the future—even if that place houses a clay idol.

Observing French society at the end of the nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim forged a concept for phenomena of this kind that remains sharp today: anomie. In Suicide, he wrote:

“Anomie, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds.”¹

Anomie does not precisely mean “the absence of norms.” It is a transitional condition in which old norms have broken down and new ones have yet to form. The framework of meaning that society offers the individual has failed, while no replacement has grown in its place. The individual is suspended in a vacuum, knowing neither where effort is meant to lead nor by what standard success and failure should be measured. Durkheim diagnosed Europe’s rapid transition from traditional to industrial society in the nineteenth century, but his “institutional gap between expectations and reality” needs almost no translation in contemporary China.

Temple fever, tarot, bazi, MBTI, and the digital wooden fish look wildly different on the surface. Their underlying structure is the same: each provides a cheap narrative substitute for a sense of personal future that has lost its institutional support. MBTI tells you “who you are” in an age when a job no longer defines identity. Tarot tells you “what happens next” in an age when planning has lost credibility. Offering incense hands all uncertainty to an object that will never reject you. The void they fill has a much older name.

A spiritual withdrawal seventeen centuries ago

In the third century, Chinese history experienced a strikingly similar spiritual earthquake.

After four hundred years, the tournament of advancement built from Confucian classics and the recommendation system of the Eastern Han finally collapsed. The authority of classical learning was politically destroyed in the Partisan Prohibitions; the fairness of recommendation was corroded by the monopoly of great clans; and the gulf between Confucian moral discourse—mingjiao, the orthodox code—and the exercise of power grew too wide for rhetoric to conceal. The Sima clan usurped the throne in the name of abdication and tore away the final veil over “loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, and righteousness.” As returns from the orthodox route collapsed and official discourse lost credibility, the elite turned its energy inward: from statecraft to metaphysical conversation, and from official service to the mountains.

In The Scholar and Chinese Culture, Yu Yingshi offered a precise intellectual history of this turn. The rise of Wei-Jin xuanxue, he argued, was essentially a collective experiment in which the scholar-gentry sought alternative spiritual settlement after institutionalised Confucian ethics lost authority. He wrote:

“The attitudes of Wei-Jin scholar-officials toward mingjiao can broadly be divided into three schools: those who defended it, those who infused it with a new spirit, and those who rejected it entirely and returned to nature.”²

These three paths spread across the elite like a spectrum. Those defending mingjiao were the aristocratic officials still operating within the system; their counterparts today are young people still giving everything to civil-service and public-institution examinations. Those “infusing mingjiao with a new spirit” were thinkers such as Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, who sought a reconciliation between Confucianism and Daoism; their counterparts might be young intellectuals pursuing “meaning entrepreneurship” at the system’s edge. The most uncompromising spokesman for the third path—complete rejection of mingjiao and return to nature—was Ji Kang.

Ji Kang left behind the most famous letter of severance in Chinese literary history. Around 261, his old friend Shan Tao, courtesy name Juyuan, was appointed to a personnel office and recommended Ji Kang for government service. Ji refused in his Letter Breaking Off Relations with Shan Juyuan. He listed his many reasons for being unsuited to office, moving between mockery and resolve, before suddenly drawing a dagger of a sentence:

“I have always condemned Tang and Wu and held the Duke of Zhou and Confucius in contempt. This is not the only such matter in my life; once revealed, it cannot be tolerated by the teachings of the age.”³

To condemn Tang and Wu and disdain Zhou and Confucius had roughly the force, in that time, of someone announcing publicly today: “I believe taking the civil-service examination is a waste of life.” It rejected no particular policy. It rejected the legitimacy of an entire system of meaning: I refuse to recognise the standards by which you measure success. Ji knew that these words would be “intolerable to the teachings of the age.” He was right. Two years later, Sima Zhao had him executed. At the place of execution, Ji played Guangling San on the qin and calmly went to his death.

The most revealing detail is the form of his choice. Ji raised no army, submitted no memorial, and organised no opposition. His resistance was wholly spiritual: he refused office, refused cooperation, and refused to describe his life in the language of the system. He chose to withdraw.

Young Chinese people in the 2020s have done almost exactly the same. Their “condemning Tang and Wu and scorning Zhou and Confucius” is the silence of not reposting, liking, or taking a position; the postponement of becoming full-time children, slow employment, and repeated examination attempts; the deliberate deceleration of a “45-degree life.” They have no organisation, leader, or programme. Quietly, one by one, they simply walk away from the edge of the track. Ji Kang’s withdrawal was one person’s resolve. When millions make the same choice, it is no longer an expression of individual temperament but a set of macroeconomic data. And when that withdrawal reaches into the most intimate domains—the choice not to marry or have children—it becomes a silent nationwide referendum.

The limits of the Wei-Jin mirror

Analogies illuminate, but analogies require discipline. Which aspects of China in the 2020s can the Wei-Jin mirror reveal, and where does it refract misleading light?

The similarities lie deep in the structure. Both eras reached the exhausted final stage of a tournament for advancement. The Han system of classics and recommendation and today’s educational arms race plus civil-service examinations both demand enormous personal investment for a limited number of upward openings; both saw marginal returns plunge after operating for generations. Both eras suffered a severe credibility deficit in official discourse. The hypocrisy of mingjiao, like the gulf today between “positive energy” rhetoric and lived experience, forces the elite to maintain an increasingly expensive firewall between public expression and private judgement. And in both eras, the elite drew energy back from public participation into personal aesthetics and interiority. The drinking, music, and “pure conversation” of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove are functionally akin to temple trips, tarot, podcasts, and audiobooks today.

Liu Yiqing’s A New Account of the Tales of the World records a detail that could be pasted directly into contemporary social media. Wang Ziyou, or Wang Huizhi, was living in Shanyin. He awoke one snowy night, opened the window, drank wine, and suddenly thought of his friend Dai Andao, who lived by the Shan River. He took a boat through the night. After travelling until morning and reaching Dai’s door, he turned around without going in. Asked why, he replied:

“I went on a tide of feeling and returned when the feeling was spent. Why must I see Dai?”⁴

“Going on a tide of feeling and returning when it is spent” miniaturises the entire Wei-Jin aesthetic: the process is the purpose, the experience the meaning, and only an act that serves no result is free. Young people today call this “listening to your heart” or “being yourself.” Their whirlwind travel, City Walks, and activity-partner relationships practise a reduced form of the same ideal. The difference is that Wang could follow his feeling because the estates of the Wang clan of Langya stood behind him. For a young person today, the feeling often ends abruptly when the credit-card bill arrives.

The differences matter just as much. Ignore them, and the analogy collapses into lyricism.

The first difference is the availability of retreat. The great Wei-Jin clans owned self-sufficient estates; “retiring to the mountains” was a genuine material option. Tao Yuanming could “pick chrysanthemums beneath the eastern fence” because he had an eastern fence. Young people today have no estates. They have a ten-square-metre rented room and food delivered in thirty minutes. The division of labour in modern society permits no genuine exit. You may lie flat spiritually, but every month rent, social insurance, and phone bills demand that you connect to the system somehow. Exit is gestural; connection is structural. Contemporary “lying flat” is therefore more psychologically torturous than Wei-Jin reclusion. It is an incomplete withdrawal, a permanent oscillation between participation and refusal.

The second difference is the consequence. Three centuries of division and warfare followed Wei-Jin “pure conversation”—the Sixteen Kingdoms and the Northern and Southern dynasties, accompanied by enormous population loss and partial ruptures in civilisation. Many who invoke the Wei-Jin analogy point implicitly toward this terrifying ending: spiritual anomie heralds political collapse. Methodologically, however, the inference does not stand. The political breakdown had independent and sufficient structural causes: the rise of military aristocracies, a vacuum in central military power, and migration pressures from northern peoples. No rigorous causal relationship between pure conversation and collapse has ever been established. Spiritual anomie may precede collapse, or it may simply be a society’s adjustment under pressure. Countless intermediate links requiring independent proof lie between it and political disintegration.

Where, then, is today’s spiritual anomie more likely to lead?

A future closer to Japan

A more recent and comparable reference is Japan after the 1990s.

In his 2015 book The Low-Desire Society, Kenichi Ohmae offered an almost anthropological account of young Japanese people after the bubble burst:

“Young Japanese have no desire, no dreams, no drive. … They do not want to rise above others, and do not want cars or luxury goods. Their willingness to consume has fallen to its lowest point.”⁵

Ohmae named this condition the “low-desire society.” Its features include young people refusing mortgages, delaying or forgoing marriage and children, reducing consumption to daily necessities, losing interest in promotion, and turning to small private satisfactions. Applied to urban Chinese youth in 2024, the list needs hardly a word changed.

Japan offers a decisive empirical counterexample: spiritual anomie does not necessarily lead to political collapse. In the “lost thirty years” after the bubble burst, GDP growth hovered around zero and the population continued to shrink, but social order remained stable, democratic institutions continued to operate, and the crime rate even declined. A low-desire society can be quiet, orderly, and slowly ageing. Japan demonstrated one possible modernity: a generation’s disappointment need not end in violent rupture; it can be absorbed through prolonged stagnation and gentle contraction.

Through this framework, China’s spiritual trajectory in the 2020s is more likely to resemble Japanese low desire than Wei-Jin dynastic disintegration. Involution, lying flat, offering incense, and tapping a digital wooden fish all retreat rather than confront; they lower expectations rather than overturn the table. They signal the arrival of modernity, not the end of civilisation. When a society is prosperous, safe, and atomised enough that individuals can reject mainstream values alone, without collective action, the rejection naturally tends toward quiet rather than violence.

Yet the Japanese analogy also requires discipline. Three fissures separate China and Japan. First, Japan grew old with per-capita GDP above forty thousand US dollars, a mature social safety net, and universal health and pension coverage. China is growing old at roughly thirteen thousand dollars per capita, and nearly 300 million migrant workers lack urban employee pension insurance. Low desire lacks the material floor it had in Japan. Second, Japan stagnated under the American security umbrella with trade channels broadly open; China would stagnate behind tariff walls and technological restrictions. Third and most fundamentally, Japan has elections as a pressure-release valve. Prime ministers changed more than a dozen times in three decades, and policy shifted with public opinion. Disappointment could be expressed through voting, however limited the effect. China has no such buffer. When disappointment can be released neither through exit—the social structure prevents genuine withdrawal—nor through voice—the political structure provides no channel for it—it can only settle. Sedimented disappointment does not disappear. It merely becomes silent and dense, waiting for an unpredictable moment to find an unpredictable outlet.

Albert Hirschman’s classic 1970 framework has an almost cruel explanatory force here. Faced with a disappointing organisation or system, the individual has three options: exit, voice, or loyalty. Hirschman wrote:

“The exit option is widely held to be uniquely important in keeping sellers alert. It is the threat of exit that acts as the primary restraining force.”⁶

The threat of exit is the chief force compelling an organisation to correct itself. But in a society where geographic exit is costly, political voice is narrow, and loyalty is exhausted, all three roads are half blocked. A fourth option appears, unnamed in Hirschman’s model: remain in place, but turn the volume all the way down. Do not leave, shout, or pledge loyalty; quietly lower every expectation. That is what is happening today. It is quieter than exit, safer than voice, and more honest than loyalty.

The disappearance of “the nearby”

Of all analyses of contemporary China’s spiritual condition, one concept proposed by the anthropologist Xiang Biao is particularly penetrating: the disappearance of the nearby.

In a conversation with Xu Zhiyuan, Xiang described the peculiar dumbbell shape of contemporary Chinese life. At one end sits the intensely private self—the phone screen and the inner world. At the other sits the grand collective imaginary—the nation, the people, and the global order. The level between them, “the nearby,” is systematically disappearing: the neighbourhood where you live, your neighbours, the streets you walk each day, and the concrete people and places with which you interact face to face. He summarised it this way:

“There is a major problem in how our attention is distributed. We pay great attention to the self and to the world, but the intermediate level of ‘the nearby,’ as a basic unit through which life is perceived, has been hollowed out.”⁷

The disappearance of the nearby is not a spatial problem. It is a problem of meaning. When you do not know your neighbours, care about changes on your street, or participate in collective life at the community level, the most basic intermediary between you and the world is missing. No matter how stirring grand narratives such as “national rejuvenation” and “the rise of a great power” may be, they cannot directly redeem the individual’s need for everyday meaning. No matter how refined a purely private life of consumption, entertainment, and self-care becomes, it lacks recognition and response from others. People need the nearby because it is the soil in which meaning grows: in the neighbourhood, you are known, needed, and remembered, and your actions produce visible consequences within reach.

Xiang’s diagnosis resonates deeply with Durkheim’s concept of anomie. Durkheim traced modern anomie to the breakdown of traditional community. Xiang identifies the precise level at which the breakdown occurs: not the most intimate family, which remains, nor the most distant state, which is everywhere, but the middle layer through which the individual forms an organic bond with society.

In China, several forces accelerate the disappearance. Urbanisation uprooted hundreds of millions from communities of acquaintances and replanted them in compounds of strangers. Platform economies moved every daily need—food, travel, shopping, and social life—from the street to the screen, stripping streets of their function as sites of public life. Community-level self-government has long been institutionally absent, with residents’ committees operating more often as administrative terminals than vehicles of resident autonomy. The nearby has become like a sheet pulled from above and below, stretched thinner and thinner until it turns transparent.

Suspension is thus the existential background of this generation. You can shed tears over the maiden flight of a Chinese-built airliner on your phone, then turn around unable to name the neighbour opposite. You can know every detail of the China-US chip contest but not know who is responsible for the pipes on your floor. Grand narratives offer pride and the private world offers comfort, but no bridge connects them. The psychological cost of suspension is a diffuse unreality: everything operates and you operate within it, yet you cannot determine your relationship to the machine. You are not one of its parts—you can be replaced at any time—but neither are you its owner—you have no power of decision. You merely happen to be present.

A silent refusal

On the surface, the new pure conversation is a consumer phenomenon: temple tickets, tarot sales, MBTI labels, and downloads of the digital wooden fish. At the middle level, it is a social-psychological phenomenon: after returns from the orthodox route collapse, a generation withdraws its energy from external competition into inner experience, and from long-term planning into immediate sensation. At the deepest level lies a structural crisis of meaning: the old social contract—work hard and you will rise—has failed, while no new contract has formed. The nearby has been hollowed out. Individuals float in the vacuum between private life and the state, using fragments of spiritual consumption to maintain a minimum supply of meaning.

The Wei-Jin analogy illuminates half the situation. When official discourse loses credibility and the marginal return from the tournament of advancement falls to zero, the elite’s spiritual turn can display a structural similarity across seventeen centuries. But the analogy must stop there. The three centuries of division after Wei-Jin had independent military and political causes and cannot be deduced directly from spiritual anomie. Japan is a more plausible reference: the slow ageing of a low-desire society—quiet and orderly, but also dull and stagnant. Yet the three fissures between China and Japan—income, external conditions, and pressure-release mechanisms—mean that a Chinese low-desire society would be rougher, tenser, and less cushioned.

Before his execution, Ji Kang finished his final piece and said, “From this day, Guangling San is lost.”⁸ To him, the loss of a composition was more regrettable than the end of a life. Such an extreme elevation of aesthetics above survival cannot be reproduced today. But his central act—the refusal expressed through silence, non-cooperation, and turning away—is being reproduced by the hundred million. The difference is that Ji Kang knew what he rejected. Many young people today cannot necessarily articulate what they reject. They are simply tired: tired of the track, tired of performance, tired of the promise that “you only need to work a little harder.”

And so they offer incense. Merit +1.

Notes