Ruling class doesn't care as long as these people still playing the game. Lying flat types aren't gonna be willing to put in the effort to be overly countercultural
nothing i said requires any "counter-cultural" effort, or any special effort whatsoever. less people and less productivity are predictable outcomes of "lying flat" if it happens at scale, and the ruling class won't like that. we are already observing this with a push by the chinese government offering incentives against it. they wouldn't be doing that if they didn't care about it. they also don't care about it out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously. it's a bad thing for the ruling class, so they will act to prevent too many people doing it.
My definition of hard is burdensome. If love is a burden resentment is inevitable.
effortful/burdensome tasks or responsibilities do not "inevitably" create resentment. people even deliberately seek those out, for things they value. similarly you criticize the use of the word "sacrifice" but more or less say the same thing using different words. choices come at the exclusion of other choices using the same time spent etc. we agree on "enjoy the game or don't play it" though. what's torture for one person is something another greatly enjoys when it comes to some tradeoffs.
people draw their lines at different points. policy may or may not shift the line enough to make a difference, depending on the person.
I don't think people in the more enlightened parts of the West, where the number of hours people work are regulated, where it's customary to stop work at the end of the stipulated work day, can really claim to be "lying flat". Yes, what you literally do may be the same, but the reasons are entirely different. You do it because that's more or less the norm there, an established tradition, a core part of your extant hegemonic culture.
no, this behavior is very much new to the "modern" version of the west as well, at least if considered at scale. the living conditions are better, but this behavior is no "established tradition". this behavior wasn't known or apparent at scale in the 1990s or 2000s to my knowledge. it's the first time usa has shown signs of it, and hasn't been prevalent in the west for quite a few generations. that's not what an "established tradition" looks like.
i'm not even convinced the reasons are that that different. at the end of the day, a higher % of the population is deciding the juice isn't worth the squeeze, that additional effort won't bring any reward they care about enough to actually do said additional effort. the factors that go into that evaluation are different like you say, but that people are doing that evaluation and arriving at a similar conclusion seems to be consistent.
Don't. Appropriate. Others'. Resistance. Efforts.
lol. who is going to stop that? you? what does it even mean to "appropriate" in this context? what, precisely, is being "resisted"?
maybe some people are acting this way in protest, but i don't think that's actually true as a whole. it's not like people are "lying flat" with some ultimatum for a specific policy change that will make them turn around and immediately stop "lying flat" once their conditions are met. best as i can tell, this sort of behavior seems less structured and more of a symptom of broken incentives than it is an open/deliberate protest of those incentives.
After reading article in the OP, this immediately springs to mind:
i'm not sure it's even that young. people follow their incentives, and history has had broken incentive structures where being a productive citizen + having children was too costly/unappealing to the average person before. it looks different between times and cultures, but as i mentioned above i think the most basic processes are the same; more people than is sustainable decide that working beyond a certain point isn't worth it, so they don't.
aside from altering incentives + especially removing disincentives, i don't think the course changes.
