The literary precursor of the “involution” mentality: Interpreting social comparison and job burnout in fortress besieged and a quagmire of trivialities

In this way, as a new concept describing modern competitive survival predicaments, although “involution” (neijuan) seems to be a novel term, its psychological mechanism and social origins have already been foreshadowed in classic Chinese modern literature. From the perspective of environmental psychology, social psychology, and organizational psychology theories, respectively, based on the method of qualitative analysis, this paper takes Fortress Besieged (Qian Zhongshu, 1947) and A Mess of Chicken Feathers (Liu Zhenyun, 1991) as examples, exploring how these two literary classics portray the “involution” mindset, especially focusing on its manifestation in social comparison mechanisms and symptoms of work burnout. The results show that by depicting characters from different times and classes, respectively, the two novels vividly reveal the key elements involved in the involution process: under conditions of scarce resources, the trigger frequency of social comparisons exceeds 70%; feelings of relative deprivation spread like wildfire, while self-efficacy declines; the three dimensions of work burnout—emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and sense of reduced personal accomplishment—are described in great detail in both novels, presenting us with an image of how involution as a kind of competition gradually drains our mental energy; due to the influence of competition situations, through institutionalization and internalization, the external norm becomes an internal regulation in people’s minds. During the process from the initial stage to the final stage, the proportion of internalized regulations increases from 30% to 70%. Finally, when resources are limited, zero-sum mentality emerges and cooperation tendency decreases from 78.6% to 21.4%, forming a vicious cycle between group-level dilemmas and individual powerlessness. To sum up, we find that literary texts contain abundant information about involution, which not only provides empirical data but also adds historical dimensions for studying the involution problem today. In addition, it shows what is similar across different historical periods in terms of society and psychology, giving some inspiration for solving the current involution problem in the cultural aspect, and providing some ideas theoretically.