In recent years, the vocabulary young Chinese use to describe their emotional states has evolved rapidly, supercharged by online discourse. Words like “emo,” short for “emotional,” “内耗 (nèihào),” internal exhaustion, and “活人微死 (huórén wēi sǐ),” or living but slightly dead, once dominated young people’s diction. But lately, more specialized and academic terms drawn from psychology, neuroscience, and even philosophy have begun to take root as ways to describe idiosyncratic mental states or simply personal struggles.
Amid this “cyber psychological diagnosis (互联网精神诊断 hùliánwǎng jīngshén zhěnduàn)” movement, one of the most recent expressions to go viral is 奥德赛时期 (Àodésài shíqī), or “odyssey years.” Drawn from Homer’s epic The Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus spends a decade wandering and enduring countless trials before finally returning home to Ithaca, the term was first popularized by American author David Brooks in 2007. It is often used to describe “emerging adulthood,” a life stage identified by American developmental psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in the early 2000s to characterize the prolonged transition between adolescence and adulthood among younger generations.
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In 2026, a Chinese influencer used the term to describe the post-graduation transition period, which struck a chord with Chinese netizens. The picture it paints is of 20- or 30-somethings who, fresh out of university and newly into the working world, feel lost and anxious about their futures, careers, and identities. A typical online confession might read:
I’m currently in my odyssey years, having changed jobs four times in three years after graduation, but still having no idea what I want.
我现在正处于奥德赛时期，毕业三年, 换了四份工作，还不知道自己想干什么。
Or it can be used to comfort others:
Don’t worry, the odyssey years are meant for trails and errors.
别急，奥德赛时期就是用来试错的。
The term resonates because it gives a name to a widely shared experience. Following the same logic, the psychological term “highly sensitive people (高敏感人群 gāo mǐngǎn rénqún),” also gained popularity among those who feel socially frustrated. Originally referring to people with unusually sharp senses and strong emotional reactions, the phrase quickly became a label for self-identity on social media, used to explain social fatigue, emotional ups and downs in relationships, and even everyday discomfort, turning what was once a neutral personality trait into a means to justify people’s inner struggles and anxiety:
High sensitivity is not your weakness, but your gift.
高敏感不是你的弱点，而是你的天赋。
Another term that often shows up hand in hand with “high sensitivity” is “socialization (社会化 shèhuìhuà).” Rather than the more commonly understood academic meaning of “becoming a social being,” this buzzword now refers to one’s ability to adapt to social rules and handle interpersonal relationships. “Having a high level of socialization,” or 社会化程度高 (shèhuìhuà chéngdù gāo), means being socially adept, while low socialization implies that one struggles to get by:
My level of socialization is too low to go to work.
我社会化程度太低了，不适合上班。
However, looking inward doesn’t always explain the problems one might be facing, so a tendency to attribute to external factors for perceived shortcomings has also emerged. Whether it’s family backgrounds, intimate relationships, or the workplace, everything is a potential cause. One prominent term is “family of origin (原生家庭 yuánshēng jiātíng),” a psychological concept introduced in the 1960s to describe a person’s family environment during development. It gained widespread popularity in China largely thanks to psychologist Wu Zhihong, who outlined it in his 2007 book Why Families Hurt. Since then, the concept has been widely cited for many personal issues, from challenging personality traits to relationship woes:
If you keep blaming your family origin, you haven’t grown up; if you never blame it, you haven’t even begun to know yourself.
如果你一直怪原生家庭，说明你还没长大；如果你不怪原生家庭，说明你还没开始认识自己。
“NPD,” or narcissistic personality disorder (自恋型人格障碍 zìliànxíng réngé zhàng’ài), is a clinical term that has increasingly been adopted by young netizens as a label for individuals perceived as excessively self-centered, lacking empathy, and prone to manipulative behavior. The term gained widespread attention in 2024, when a male guest on the reality show See You Again was considered to encapsulate many NPD traits. Alongside “PUA,” which, unlike its “pick-up artist” meaning in the West, is broadly used in China to refer to any situation where psychological manipulation and emotional control appear to be used by someone to get what they want:
This job is definitely not for humans—our NPD boss is PUA-ing us every day.
这工作简直不是人干的，NPD领导成天PUA我们。
Some even draw broader generalizations about society and culture, opening the wider East Asian cultural context to critical reflection. Labels like “East Asian family (东亚家庭 Dōng Yà jiātíng)” and “East Asian kids (东亚小孩 Dōng Yà xiǎohái)” have become increasingly common in discussions of personal struggles—the former pointing to a high-pressure and often emotionally neglectful household, while the latter refers to those who grew up in such environments and are still struggling with its effects:
As East Asian kids, we grew up feeling like we’re never good enough.
我们东亚小孩就是一生都觉得自己不够好。
Others, however, chose to skip all the psychological analysis and cut straight to neuroscience for a more hardcore diagnosis. Clinical terms like “prefrontal cortex (前额叶 qián’éyè),” “amygdala (杏仁核 xìngrénhé),” and “cortisol (皮质醇 pízhìchún)” are now part of daily vocabulary, used to explain myriad mental and emotional dysfunctions. Take “prefrontal-cortex damage (前额叶损伤 qián’éyè sǔnshāng),” for example. Medically, it describes actual brain injuries that can cause severe behavioral issues. Yet on the internet, it has been repurposed as a catch-all excuse for procrastination, distraction, impulsiveness, and mood swings:
Can’t write a single word today—it is true that chronic stress leads to prefrontal-cortex damage.
一个字都写不出来，果然慢性压力会导致前额叶损伤。
Similarly, cortisol, often dubbed the stress hormone, has also become a frequent topic of discussion. Rather than simply saying “I’m stressed,” people now prefer the more dramatic expression “my cortisol levels are through the roof” to describe a state of extreme pressure. In some cases, cortisol has even been blamed for failed weight-loss attempts:
Three days of overtime in a row, my cortisol must be through the roof. No wonder I can’t lose this belly fat.
连着加了三天班，感觉我的皮质醇已经爆表了，难怪肚子瘦不下去。
Netizens haven’t stopped at cyber self-diagnosis; they are equally into “cyber mutual aid,” mostly drawn from a series of philosophical and psychological self-help guides circulating the web. The term “subjectivity (主体性 zhǔtǐxìng)” is now widely used to encourage people to stop focusing on what others think and take back control of their own lives. In a culture deeply rooted in Confucian, relationship-centered traditions, “being yourself” can sometimes feel like a luxury, while “subjectivity” is often framed as a quick-fix way to escape external pressures:
You can’t prioritize others’ feelings over your own; finding your subjectivity is what matters most.
你不能总是先考虑别人的感受，找回主体性才是最重要的。
Finally, when it comes to practical solutions, “separation of tasks (课题分离 kètí fēnlí)” has become a kind of magic elixir. First introduced by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, but popularized in China by the 2013 bestseller The Courage to Be Disliked by Japanese authors Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi, this concept argues that all interpersonal conflicts arise from meddling in others’ tasks or having one’s own tasks meddled with. Adler says that this endless mental friction can simply be remedied by defining to whom a task belongs and giving others’ tasks back to them:
Parents’ pressuring you to marry is their task; whether you marry is yours. By practicing separation of tasks, you don’t have to take responsibility for other people’s emotions.
父母催婚是他们的事儿，结不结婚是你的事。学会课题分离，不用为别人的情绪买单。
This idea has further evolved into an even more blunt internet mantra:
Let go of your savior complex and respect other people’s fate.
放下助人情结，尊重他人命运。
From “odyssey years” to “family of origin,” “cortisol spikes” to “task separation,” a new wave of pop psychology expressions is offering young people a language for understanding, accepting, and even defending themselves against modern life’s growing pressures. They might not fix the root issues, but by giving people a release valve, they offer connection in the face of shared uncertainty.
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