Growth's True Cost Is Not Economic — It Is the Hollow You Carry
Hollowness Is Not Emptiness. It Is the Sound of a Channel That Was Never Opened
No single word can hold what China has lived through in the past few decades.
But if I had to choose one character, I’d choose: fast.
How fast? Fast enough that a whole system of logic was installed in the bone before it was ever tested. That logic: growth is everything. Development, efficiency, run faster, then faster still. This wasn’t a slogan. For decades, it was the air everyone breathed every day. You didn’t choose it. It’s what you were raised inside of.
That phase worked because there was a hidden premise underneath it: the future will be better. So whatever you sacrifice now is worth it. Sacrifice rest, sacrifice feeling, sacrifice those things that are hard to name but dimly matter — yes, those things. The real connection between you and another person. Your right to spend an afternoon doing nothing, just drifting. The space to stop and ask: what do I actually want?
These things didn’t disappear. They were mortgaged. Exchanged for growth, for numbers, for one bigger target after another.
This was a form of borrowing. Except no one signed a contract. No one knew the interest rate. And no one knew when it would come due.
Then growth slowed down.
Not suddenly — gradually, you began to sense something was off. You were still running, but the finish line seemed to be moving backward. Still working hard, but the returns kept thinning. Everyone around you was running too. All of you running, none of you knowing toward what, none of you daring to stop and ask.
This is when the debt started coming due.
But the people repaying it weren’t the ones who borrowed.
The generation that borrowed has largely already cashed out. The house came through. The position came through. That logic ran to completion for them — the cost was steep, but at least there was a return. They passed it down like a gift. Not out of malice. They genuinely believed it was a gift.
What the next generation received was an entire way of operating they never chose, inside a world where growth had already slowed but the logic was still running on momentum. You inherited the posture of someone sprinting — but the road had changed.
The debt landed on you.
What does the debt look like?
Not only economic. The economic part is actually the easiest to see.
The deeper debt is this: you don’t know how to stop. Not that you don’t want to — you genuinely don’t know how. What to do after stopping. What to feel. How to be with yourself. None of this was ever taught, never modeled. When the growth logic was running, these questions were a luxury — there was no room for them. Now that the logic is starting to fail, these questions are surfacing from underground. But you have no tools to handle them.
The debt goes deeper still: the connections between you and other people have grown thinner. Not because you stopped caring, but because decades of efficiency logic ran every relationship through a filter — useful ones stayed, the rest were too costly to maintain. Over time, you started applying the same standard to everything and everyone without realizing it. Seeing interests everywhere, efficiency everywhere, a machine that must keep running everywhere. You didn’t become a worse person. You were trained into this shape.
I call this state hollow. Not the kind of hollow where you know you’re empty and it hurts — that at least involves awareness. I mean the state where even awareness hasn’t arrived. The channel through which you feel life — before you ever noticed, it was quietly switched off.
More than ten years ago, I was studying in England, living in a small city. On weekends, every shop closed.
I came to understand later that this wasn’t backwardness. It was a choice. They didn’t want seven working days a week, because that would mean a whole life of working. They put life in that place deliberately.
Then, gradually, Chinese immigrants came to that city and opened shops. They saw the weekend as open market. They opened. Local shops couldn’t hold out, and followed.
Some weekends in that city disappeared, just like that.
No one was the villain. It’s just that the logic of growth entered a place, spread like a gas, pulled everyone into it, and slowly squeezed another way of living out.
We spent decades building one leg until it was extraordinarily strong. That leg is what carried us to where we stand today. I say that without any reservation.
But the debt is also real. It doesn’t appear on any balance sheet. It lives in every person who doesn’t know how to stop, in every relationship that’s grown thinner, in every person who can no longer feel the hollow.
You never borrowed this debt. But you’re repaying it.
Knowing that — and not knowing it — leads to a different life. Not because knowing lets you stop paying. But because knowing changes your relationship to the thing. You’re no longer only someone running inside it. You begin to be someone who can see it.
Being able to see it is already a different place to stand.