'Love yourself' — young China's new wellness mantra to cope with the rat race
A cup of milk tea / gettyimagesbank
For 26-year-old Tianjin office worker Celine Wang, it is an extra cup of milk tea.
"One for me and the other for lao ji," she said, placing the double order on a workday afternoon in January.
"After going through all the difficulties from trying to be the best performer at school to surviving at my workplace, I feel tired.
"I've decided to treat myself well ... ai ni lao ji," she said, using a buzzword that took off in the gaming world and has become a mantra for personal wellness in China.
The phrase means "love you, dear self" and has exploded in use across platforms like Douyin, RedNote and Kuaishou, collectively racking up billions of views in recent months.
Users post about small indulgences like enjoying a late-night snack after working overtime or praising themselves after a hard study session. Young people especially have embraced acts of self-compassion and immediate self-reward.
More than just a meme, the "love yourself" phenomenon is a survival strategy for a generation exhausted by cutthroat academic competition on campus, a stagnant job market and long, gruelling hours at work. By celebrating small joys, the young are pushing back against fatigue and a culture of perfectionism.
China's young adults have much to be tired and anxious about. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the urban youth unemployment rate for those aged between 16 and 24, excluding students, hovered at about 17 percent late last year, leaving the uncertainty of gig work as one of the few options for many.
China's young adults have much to be tired and anxious about, with the tight job market being one of the factors. gettyimagesbank
Mental health challenges add to the difficulties. Some surveys indicate high rates of depressive symptoms among adolescents and young adults, often linked to academic stress, family expectations and economic uncertainty.
Nearly 30 percent of adolescents in China exhibit depressive symptoms at varying levels and the rate was at about 10 percent among adults, according to a 2024 report by the Mental Health Committee of the China Association of Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment.
Carrie Lian, a third-year university student from the southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, said she started thinking about the concept before it was in widespread use.
Struggling to find an internship to improve her job prospects in a highly competitive labor market, Lian said she began to pay less attention to social benchmarks.
She said many "young people in China are becoming more focused on themselves" as they "try to break free from conventional societal appraisal and treat themselves well to address their emotional problems".
"We have heard too much propaganda about the excellence of others," she said, citing the backlash over a Zhejiang University WeChat account article from 2019.
The article highlighted the achievements of 24 top scholarship winners from nearly 70,000 university students but rather than promoting excellence, the article drew sharp criticism for disregarding the vast majority. It was later taken down.
"When meritocracy reaches a certain extreme, everyone starts to feel exhausted and fatigued," Lian said, leading people to become "more willing to turn back to ourselves, to discover and recognise our own value".
For Ben Yang, a university student in Guangzhou in China's southern Guangdong province, the phrase shows how "everyone knows now that we need to treat ourselves better".
"For a long time, we were too concerned about what others thought and quantifiable achievements," Yang said. "Now, people are realising that constantly seeking all that leads to endless competition."
Yang said many people were "rediscovering themselves, befriending themselves and combating anxiety through self-acceptance".
"Ai ni lao ji," meaning "love you, dear self" is a term that took off in the gaming world and has become a mantra for personal wellness in China. gettyimagesbank
Chinese state media outlets have largely embraced the "love yourself" message with positive commentaries, framing it as a healthy and mature form of self-care.
In December, The Paper, a Shanghai-based news outlet, published an opinion piece hailing the meme as "the kindest of the year" for its practical approach to building a friendly self-relationship.
The following month, Xinhua Daily echoed the praise, saying the meme signalled a "profound mindset change" among young people, moving from self-deprecation to "gentle self-reconciliation".
People's Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, highlighted the phrase as a "collective psychological self-rescue", quoting experts who described it as turning inward for support rather than seeking endless external validation.
It portrayed the meme as a lighthearted yet profound shift from rigid self-criticism to gentle self-affirmation, encouraging people to "praise themselves more", accept imperfections and find relaxation in daily life without abandoning responsibility.
Yu Lingna, a Chinese psychologist and founder of Tokyo-based Yingxintang consulting service, said the idea conveyed an attitude of "if no one comes to love me, then I'll just love myself properly".
Amid the concept's warmth and playfulness, there was "bleakness and loneliness, as many lose faith in romantic love, friendship, genuine interpersonal relationships and deep emotional connections", Yu added.
"Mainstream Chinese media have shown an increasingly obvious tendency to pander to or cater to the youth in recent years, a correction to the excessively pompous tone of past discourse," she said.
"They have come to recognise the importance of the younger generation. They have realised that if young people collectively refuse to marry and have children, society's future development could face serious problems."
Yu said that what "truly matters is enabling more young people to take part in actually building society - at the very least solving issues like employment".
Wang, the office worker in Tianjin, said the phrase did not mean she only cared about herself.
"I just need a way to release my emotions amid intensive workplace competition. This is a correction of the social environment that has long ignored personal feelings."
Read the article at SCMP.