996, the Grandfather Problem, and Labor Debt: Why Overwork Is Not a Personal Striving Issue

1. 996 Is Not a Programmer Problem, It Is a Class Problem

"996" usually means working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Under this arrangement, the weekly workload is at least 72 hours.

This is not “being busy.” It is a long-term pattern of exhausting the body, time, dating and family life, and future possibilities through labor. Public data show that Chinese labor law generally limits working time to no more than 8 hours per day and on average no more than 44 hours per week. By that measure, 996 is not a commendable model of dedication; it is a gray-zone labor order hovering between legal limits, corporate power, and practical reality.

Many people treat 996 as a programmer problem, as if avoiding internet work and coding means avoiding this fate.

That is a misunderstanding.

996 has nothing essentially to do with the profession of programming itself. In different societies, industries, and labor markets, a programmer can be a high-income technical professional or be reduced to a high-intensity expendable role.

The real issue is not “the programmer,” but whether workers occupy a class position with family backing, whether there is community protection, whether they have asset buffers, and whether there is an exit mechanism.

Even among programmers writing the same kind of code, some people choose the field with resources and institutional protections; others enter it with no fallback and sell their time under compulsion.

The former is a career choice.

The latter is labor debt repayment.

2. The So-Called “Grandfather Problem”: You Never Start from Zero

Many people like to say, “Young people need to rely on themselves.” It sounds fair in theory, but it is often cruel in practice.

No one starts from zero. Before a person is even born, ancestors have already made choices for them: whether to migrate, accumulate assets, preserve housing and land, learn skills, build networks, maintain clan and community ties, control family size, and secure meaningful education for the next generation.

These choices do not disappear with the death of those who made them. They persist as housing, debt, education, urban status, language ability, career resources, risk awareness, and family habits carried forward to the next generation.

This is what I call the “grandfather problem.”

The “grandfather problem” is not a simple indictment of elders, nor is it about blaming the previous generation for everything. It means that judgments made by a family over decades of social change become the real constraints and opportunities of descendants.

When one generation does not complete asset accumulation, the next must compensate with wages. When one generation fails to build career capital, the next must battle in hiring markets with bare resumes and long hours. When one generation believed “endurance alone leads to exit,” the next may be sent into a system where endurance is demanded but escape is not available.

This is the real meaning of “debt repayment.”

It is not karmic retribution; it is an account ledger in social structure.

3. A Profession Gets “Downgraded” by the Class Origins of Its Workers

When programming first became a popular profession in China, it was packaged as high-paying, technical, white-collar, and “future-oriented.” But as large numbers of ordinary students from ordinary families entered the field, it quickly took on the traits of ordinary labor: high intensity, fierce competition, substitutability, youth bias, rapid attrition.

This reveals a harsher truth:

A profession’s prestige is not determined only by technical content; it is also determined by the class origins of those who work in it.

If an industry is mainly occupied by people with assets, social identity, professional networks, and alternative options, it can appear respectable, stable, and buffered.

If an industry absorbs many young people from families without capital accumulation, who can only squeeze themselves in through credentials and raw labor time, that industry is quickly turned into a high-pressure pipeline.

On the surface, this looks like sectoral competition.

In reality, it is large numbers of people without fallback entering one channel and collectively lowering everyone’s bargaining power.

Capital prefers not a specific profession but a crowd with no retreat, fearful of unemployment, willing to overwork, and replaceable. Once that crowd is large enough, any once-respected profession can be pushed into a sweatshop mode.

A profession is not inherently noble.

Its status depends on who is inside it—and whether those people can refuse bad conditions.

4. Why Ordinary People Accept 996

To understand 996, you cannot focus only on corporate policy. You must also consider where workers come from.

Many children of ordinary families who move to major cities are not there because they truly possess urban social capital. They are pushed there by education pathways and labor-market expectations. They lack sufficient family assets, no household industry to fall back on, and often no mature professional community.

They must rely on wages to pay rent, commuting, social life, dating and marriage, healthcare, training, and uncertain futures.

Under these conditions, 996 is not a voluntary choice but coercion in another form.

1. The Cost of Refusal Is Too High

Someone with a safety net can say “no.”

Someone without one has to swallow that “no.”

Do you have savings? Can your parents help you? Do you own property? Can you survive six months unemployed? Are you carrying family debt? These factors determine whether you can reject a predatory job.

Without those conditions, “choice” remains only a word on paper.

2. Too Many Substitutes

996 exists not only because companies are powerful, but also because there are too many people willing—or compelled—to accept these terms.

When a position is backed by a queue of applicants, workers’ bargaining power falls. Even if one person is deeply resentful, they cannot change the rules alone.

You refuse, someone else does it.

You cannot keep up, someone else can endure it.

You think you are resisting, but the company is already waiting for the next younger, cheaper, more overtime-ready candidate.

3. Families Push Children into a Single Path

Many families place a very narrow expectation on children: pass exams, move to the city, get a white-collar job, buy a home, marry, have children.

Yet that path is no longer a stable upward ladder. It is a high-cost, high-competition, high-debt sorting mechanism.

Parents think they have sent their child into a “good profession.”

In reality, they may have sent them into a more advanced assembly line.

5. From “Old-Style Consuming Children” to “Modern Consuming Children”

There is a blunt but telling way to say it: past societies consumed people directly; modern societies consume them more “civilized,” more respectable.

In the past: famine, forced labor, physically punishing work, involuntary mobilization, and naked survival deprivation. Today: mortgages, 996, low wages, high housing prices, environmental risks, parenting and marriage costs, and workplace dismissal.

The form changed; the core logic has not fully changed.

Children are no longer sold outright. They are sent into high-pressure schooling and sweatshop-like workplaces. Young people are no longer conscripted in the open; they walk into overwork carrying degrees, rent, mortgage burdens, and family expectations.

That is where modern society feels colder:

It does not always order you directly to sacrifice. It makes sure you have no viable alternatives.

So exploitation no longer appears as a whip. It appears as KPIs, performance metrics, layoffs, debt repayment, age bias, and “if you don’t do it, someone else will.”

This is not a victory of civilization; it is an upgrade in the method of extraction.

6. Cities Reclaim Excess Population

Overwork, high housing prices, low birth rates, delayed marriage, burnout, anxiety, bodily depletion—these look like separate issues, but they can be understood along one line.

When many children from ordinary families move into cities, they may find they can work but struggle to put down lasting roots; they can consume but struggle to build assets; they can date but cannot afford marriage and family formation; they can rent but struggle to establish a secure household.

So they become, in the city, a kind of “human battery”: they output physical energy, cognitive output, emotional labor, and time while young. In midlife, if they do not reach management, accumulate resources, or secure assets, they are quickly replaceable by the next wave of younger workers.

The city needs their labor but does not necessarily need their permanence.

Industry needs their overtime but does not have to support family life.

Companies need their youthful “extractability” but do not necessarily bear the costs once their bodies and minds decline.

The harshness of 996 is not only long hours. It fragments life stages: 20s become a period of grinding, 30s a period of debt repayment, 40s a period of fearing replacement, and when stability is needed most, stability may never have belonged to them in the first place.

This is modern “debt repayment.”

No one is forcing you to die with a knife. Instead, you repay unresolved problems from previous generations gradually with youth, health, intimacy, reproductive capacity, and psychological stability.

7. Why “Striving Narratives” Are Toxic

Those defending 996 often say, “Young people should hustle,” “Without sacrifice there is no success,” “If you can’t endure hardship, you are not valuable.”

The danger of these claims is that they package structural oppression as a moral test of individuals.

A person who opposes 996 is not lazy. A person who refuses to trade health for salary is not unambitious. A person who rejects limitless exploitation is not lacking value.

The real question is this:

Why must a normal person sacrifice sleep, family life, health, and dignity for an extended period just to secure basic urban survival?

If a society makes “not being exploited” feel like a luxury, then the problem is not individual but structural.

Striving is not the problem.

What is the problem is labeling forced endurance by those with no exit as “striving.”

8. What Should Be Avoided Is Not 996, but No-Exit Conditions

If we do not want our children to keep falling into 996-style labor traps, what we must avoid is not one specific industry, but the absence of exit routes.

Ten years ago, many people did not believe programmers would become high-pressure laborers. Twenty years ago, many also did not believe that credentials would lose value, white-collar workers would be overworked, and urban middle classes would spend entire lives stretching themselves for housing debt.

This shows the danger of betting on one “hot” industry.

What truly matters is whether a family can leave a genuine fallback for the next generation.

1. Do Not Train Only Credentials—Build Assets and Mobility

Credentials matter, but credentials are not a fallback.

A real fallback includes assets, skill combinations, migration capacity, language ability, industry judgment, information access, physical health, and psychological resilience. People with credentials but no fallback are the easiest to absorb into high-pressure industries.

Because they seem to have choices, but in reality they do not.

2. Do Not Teach Children Only to Endure—Teach Them to Identify Bad Structures

One of the biggest failures of family education is to tell children only, “Just bear it.”

Endurance is necessary, but it cannot replace judgment. A person must distinguish between hardship that builds capacity and hardship that is merely a cost transfer from others onto their life.

If a job systematically harms health, destroys personal life, creates no long-term accumulation, offers no bargaining power, and no real future, it is not training—it is depletion.

3. Do Not Assume Personal Effort Alone Can Cross Class Boundaries

Personal effort is useful, but it is not omnipotent.

Class mobility has never been a single-point breakthrough. It is the result of family resources, social environment, industry cycles, and individual capability working together. Ordinary people should strive, yes—but they must know where to direct that effort.

Effort in the wrong direction only accelerates burnout.

4. Do Not Make Children Bear the Cost of the Family’s Wrong Judgments

A truly responsible family does not push children into the hottest field, the most competitive field, or the one that promises short-term monetization. It tries to reduce the degree to which children must be forced to sell their time later.

If a family has no assets, it must develop a broad skill portfolio early. If it has no network, it must build information competence. If it has no urban anchor, it must think through mobility pathways. If it lacks professional resources, it should not place blind faith in “a degree is enough.”

Otherwise, what adult children face is not life choice, but a debt ledger produced by family history.

9. Conclusion: 996 Is Not a Blessing, It Is an Ancestral Invoice

996 is not a blessing; it is an alarm.

It reminds us that in this society there are too many people with no exit, too many people forced to trade time for survival, and too many people whose structural disadvantages are reframed as personal laziness.

What deserves real reflection is not “why don’t young people want to work overtime,” but: why do so many who do not want to still have to?

Why has the promise of education ended up sending people into overwork?

Why do cities absorb labor but fail to provide stable life conditions?

Why do families guide children into so-called good careers without equipping them to resist harmful structures?

Debt repayment is the structural gap left by previous generations, ultimately settled by descendants through youth, health, relationships, and reproductive capacity.

That is the deepest cruelty of 996.

It is not a bad habit of one profession; it is a shared generational burden carried by class location, family choices, and labor-market conditions.

The grandfather problem is not a problem of the past.

It continues to live in the bodies of the next generation in the form of wages, rent, mortgages, overtime, anxiety, and the absence of exit options.

If you are interested in class structure and mobility, you can refer to “Class Conflict in Social Mobility” and “The Intellectual Illusion”.

FAQ

Where does the article’s analytical framework come from?

The article is mainly based on a sociological, class-analysis, and personal-observation perspective, drawing on Bourdieu (cultural capital), Marxist traditions, and contemporary Chinese social research. It is not a mechanical application of a single theory.

Does this article endorse or criticize a specific social behavior?

The author’s stance is primarily descriptive and analytical rather than a simple moral judgment. The goal is to reveal structural complexity; readers are encouraged to make their own assessments based on their experiences.

How representative are the cases in the article?

The cases and observations are suggestive, but they are not statistically representative of the whole population. It is best to read them alongside broader data and research to avoid overgeneralization.

Where can I learn more about related topics?

The Social Observation section of this site contains additional articles on labor conditions, cultural capital, family conflict, and class culture. You can browse more from the blog category page.

References

• Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and Supreme People’s Court Jointly Release Typical Cases of Overtime Labor and Employment Disputes
• Authoritative Agencies Issue a Warning Through Typical “996” Cases | People’s Daily
• 996.ICU
• The 996.ICU Movement in China: Changing Employment Relations and Labour Agency in the Tech Industry
• Working conditions & Working hours in China - L&E Global