Beyond Continuity: A Binary-Outcome Cross-Lagged Panel Model of Ikigai and Social Interaction Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults.

Against the backdrop of accelerating global workplace transformation, employee burnout has evolved from an individual psychological concern into a systemic risk to organisational sustainability. According to Mercer’s 2022–2023 Global Talent Trends study, more than 80% of Chinese enterprises have placed burnout mitigation on their priority agenda, viewing it as a core barrier to transformation. Yet despite most employees claiming to be “satisfied” with their current jobs, turnover intentions remain persistently high, exposing a profound disconnect between organisational interventions and employees’ lived experiences []. This contradiction suggests that relying on traditional questionnaires or management-imposed frameworks may fail to reach the deep discursive logic and emotional mechanisms that drive burnout. What truly burns employees out remains a question urgently in need of answers grounded in employees’ own narratives. Employees’ authentic experiences of work-related stress and burnout are increasingly expressed through social media platforms in spontaneous, real-time, and highly contextualised ways. These digital discourses not only constitute an “emotional barometer” of contemporary workplace culture [, ], but also, owing to their unstructured nature, high timeliness, and interactive group dynamics, offer researchers a valuable data source that transcends traditional survey methods []. Particularly in the Chinese context, when formal communication channels are constrained, anonymous or semi-anonymous online spaces often become the critical arenas in which employees vent emotions, share struggles, and seek resonance [, ]. Systematic analysis of such digital narratives therefore holds promise for uncovering the micro-dynamics and collective affective structures of burnout that are obscured by institutional discourses. Before turning to the specific research questions, it is necessary to briefly outline a diachronic background for readers unfamiliar with contemporary Chinese workplace culture. Around 2010, the mainstream representations of work-related exhaustion in Chinese workplaces broadly followed an individualised attribution model. Employees tended to understand burnout as a personal adaptation problem framed in terms of “insufficient stress tolerance” or “the need to adjust one’s mindset,” a narrative deeply shaped by the ethic of “hardship endurance” and “striving” that has pervaded discourse since the Reform and Opening-Up period []. Indeed, scholars have noted that managerial practices in Chinese internet companies frequently couple prolonged overtime with discourses that equate such labour with “loyalty” and “dedication,” thereby disguising structural overwork as employees’ personal choice [,]. However, from approximately 2018 onward, marked by the explosive proliferation of indigenous terms including “996,” “内卷” (involution), “躺平” (lying flat), “打工人” (workers), and “社畜” (corporate livestock), Chinese digital workplace discourse underwent a pronounced shift from individual attribution to structural attribution, repositioning workplace pressure as a systemic, institutional predicament that cannot be resolved through personal effort [,]. Among these terms, “involution” is particularly significant: anthropologist Xiang Biao has interpreted it as “an endless competitive cycle in which individuals know it to be meaningless yet cannot exit,” a race “that permits neither failure nor withdrawal” [,]. In resonance with this, “lying flat” emerged in 2021 as a form of passive resistance to excessive competition and overwork, interpreted by scholars as a nonviolent, non-cooperative refusal by Chinese youth against the “striving ethic” and neoliberal work culture []. It is precisely within the context of this diachronic discursive transformation that the question animating this study, namely how employees discuss burnout in digital public spaces, acquires its theoretical weight: it constitutes not merely a measurement of present emotional states, but a capture of an ongoing paradigm shift in discourse.