22/05/2025

LYFE THURSDAY | MAY 22, 2025

24

Young Chinese flocking to ‘retire’ o Many seek refuge from burnout

suburbs or rural areas, they attract people in their 20s or early 30s for several weeks or months and often offer fun group activities. Several have sprung up around Dali – a small, sedate city by a glassy lake, long an outpost for those with a bohemian bent. “I only permit entry to people who are pleasant to chat to, so the conversation will not run dry and there will be a spark between them,” Yan Bingyi, the founder of one youth retirement home, said. Nearby, a handful of guests lounged in the sunny courtyard, swiping their phones, exchanging jokes and playing with a dog. Yan, 37, said he often arranged home-cooked group meals or took guests on camping trips and other excursions. “All of us have to face invisible social pressure in life and find things tough when it builds up to a certain level,” he said. “What should we do then? We need to get outside, open up our own horizons and relax.” Dubbed “lying flat” or “letting it rot”, young Chinese are embracing lifestyles that snub gruelling work culture and prioritise taking it easy. The trend has coincided with a post-pandemic economic downturn that has seen urban youth unemployment hover well above 15%, its highest in years. Several proprietors said they felt many people were wrongly conflating youth retirement homes with indolence. “I do not really think people should lie around all their lives,” Yan said. “After spending a brief period here, I hope people can re-adapt to their lives and not get to the point where they feel completely crushed by the stress of the city,” he explained.

W ANG Dong has not worked for months and does not plan to, whiling away his days at a lakeside town as one of a growing number of young Chinese “retiring” in the countryside. Extended breaks from work were long unheard of in China, with its fiercely competitive office culture and where officials vaunt the blood and sweat behind the nation’s rise. But some are pushing back, giving themselves mental space to recover from burnout, feed the soul and consider other ways to contribute to society. “All of us have different things going on at any one time and we need to pay attention to our present moment,” the 29-year-old Wang said at a self-styled “youth retirement home” in Dali – China’s scenic southwestern Yunnan province. “It has been very meaningful for me to experience things during this period that cannot be judged in material terms,” he said. Wang pitched up at the hostel this year after growing jaded with his job in hospitality. Since then he has passed the time by visiting a temple, practising traditional tea preparation, going on outings with new friends or simply lazing around. He said he would stay for at least another month and that he had “no particular plans for my life afterwards”. Letting it rot Youth retirement homes selling a vision of respite from the urban grind have gone viral in China. Typically based in small towns, UN-Habitat global chief heat officer Eleni Myrivili, one of the field’s pioneers, spoke about the urgent need to redesign cities to keep asphalt-riddled areas from turning into impossible-to-escape “ovens” for the most vulnerable populations. Why are cities at the centre of your work? We identified cities are basically the ground zero of heat, where we have the most dire impacts. Cities today are heat traps and they are built for other types of temperatures, for a different climate. So, we need to understand and totally change our perspective as to how we retrofit and develop new areas. We do it in ways that take into account the fact that we will be dealing with a totally different climate in the next decades. Can you give examples of solutions your team has worked on? In Athens, we worked on the categorisation of extreme heat, so

People eating a communal meal at a ‘youth retirement home’ in Dali, in China’s southwestern Yunnan province. – AFPPIC

Live better Others dismiss youth retirement homes as a gimmick and pour their energies into more state-approved goals instead. Chen Qiankun, 21, moved from southern Guangdong province to develop dilapidated Dongwang village near the capital Beijing. China’s government has long sought to “revitalise” depopulated rural areas left behind by the country’s economic boom. At Dongwang, Chen addressed a

founder Cai Zongmou compared it to taking a gap year before returning to work a more well-rounded person. As dusk fell over his courtyard, guests cooked a communal dinner, cracked open beers, sang around a roaring campfire and played raucous card games. “China used to be poor and we have spent a long period playing catch-up. More of us are thinking about how to live better,” Cai said. – AFP landscape architects. We have to bring in ecologists, foresters, people who understand thermodynamics. On a very large scale, but also on a very local scale, we have to consider water as the most crucial element that will break us or make us as we deal with rising heat. Can you give an example of what maladaptation can look like in urban spaces? Air conditioning is a great example of maladaptation because it creates more problems than it solves. Air conditioning is extremely important to the most vulnerable populations, we have to make sure they have access to air conditioning. But we have to understand air conditioning has to be used carefully, and not as a panacea that is just going to help us deal with extreme heat. We cannot air condition ourselves out of this mess we have created, because air conditioners are an extremely selfish way of dealing with extreme heat. You cool your own little space, while at the same time, you are blowing more hot air into the public spaces. – AFP

dozen homestay owners and livestreamers at a workshop on filming and editing content for online video platforms. The aim, he said, was to teach local people new skills to boost incomes and stem rural decline. “There is no issue with young people wanting to ‘lie flat’ or ‘let it rot’ temporarily” but long-term torpor had to be resisted, Chen said. Otherwise, he warned, “a wave of young people” will retire for real. But one “retirement commune” misters – or white or green roofs on them, so they do not absorb heat while people are standing right under them. Of course, almost all of us have created plans for nature based solutions and for bringing more nature into the cities. How has climate change impacted your region? On average in the Mediterranean part of Europe, we have about 29 days of strong heat stress (relative to the average for the 1991–2020 reference period), but we jumped from the 29 (average) to 66 (days) in the summer of 2024. That is what we mean when we say the average global temperatures have surpassed 1.5°C from the pre-industrial era, it means on the ground we see these extraordinary heat seasons. How can cities prepare against these new norms? We need to be prioritising shade, wind and water – and, of course, nature. This also means we have to bring within our development and city planning projects other types of expertise. We have to bring in

Urban temps turning cities into ‘ovens’, warns UN chief heat officer WHETHER in Miami, Athens or Santiago, dedicated ambassadors are stepping up to tackle extreme urban heat around the world.

England has seen the driest February to April period since 1956, says the UK government’s Environment Agency in a recent report, amid concerns over a possible drought in the coming months. – AFPPIC

heat can be for their health and what they should be doing during heatwaves. Creating shading structures specifically for people waiting for trains or waiting for buses, so these have special cooling aspects, such as

there are specific thresholds that trigger different types of policies and actions during heatwaves to make sure we protect the most vulnerable populations. We created heat campaigns, so people understand how dangerous