摘要： 在高度竞争的社会环境中，中国当代青年群体内化了“努力—松弛”的嵌套运作逻辑，形成一种兼具绩效压力与情绪管理要求的自我治理逻辑：青年主体一方面承受以自我负责与绩效提升为核心的结构性压力，另一方面又在规范力量下渴望以从容、自控的姿态呈现自我。作为一种新兴话语，青年群体通过“松弛”叙事将沉重的奋斗过程隐形化，转而获取社会认可与象征价值。语境追溯与跨文化辨析进一步显示，当代中国语境中青年群体的“松弛”，更接近于在制度支持尚不充分条件下高度符号化的替代性姿态，呈现出悬浮亦排他的文化资本特征。由此，优绩主义不再仅通过显性的“努力”直接呈现，而是借由“松弛美学”被重新包装，以更为柔性且内隐的方式实现青年主体的自我重塑。

关键词: 松弛, 青年, 主体重塑, 符号资本, 自我治理, 优绩主义

Abstract: Technological breakthroughs are reshaping the foundations of human civilization at an unprecedented pace. Whether or not the singularity has truly arrived and whether its effects could pose a fundamental threat to humanity, these technological breakthroughs and narrative shifts together constitute a profound crisis of historical consciousness. To provide a framework of meaning and directional guidance for humanity’s response to technological challenges and intellectual shocks, the concepts of the “singularity moment” and the “Promethean dimension” serve as analytical tools. They help historians systematically examine the irreversible changes that artificial intelligence is bringing to human civilization, reveal how technological breakthroughs place humanity between the dual possibilities of creation and destruction, and reconstruct humanity’s world of meaning through a shared historical narrative. In doing so, it may become possible to achieve a civilizational leap from an “era of intelligence scarcity” to an “era of intelligence abundance”, ultimately serving the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind, safeguarding and reshaping humanity’s world of meaning amid the tides of the technological age.In recent years, the “songchi” (i.e., chillness and relaxation) narrative has widely circulated among the young generation in China, gradually transforming into a new form of symbolic capital. Co-constructed by social media and consumer culture, “songchi” has become an important norm in the formation of contemporary youth subjectivity. In a highly competitive social environment, contemporary Chinese youth have internalized a nested logic of “effort–relaxation”, giving rise to a mode of self-governance that combines performance pressure with the demand for emotional management. On the one hand, young subjects continue to bear structural pressures centered on self-responsibility and performance enhancement; on the other hand, they are also expected to present themselves through an appearance of composure, ease, and self-control. As an emerging discourse, the narrative of songchi enables young people to render the burdensome process of striving less visible, while simultaneously gaining social recognition and symbolic value. A contextual genealogy and cross-cultural comparison further suggest that, in contemporary China, “songchi” is less a straightforward equivalent of relaxation or work-life balance than a highly symbolized substitute posture formed under conditions of relatively limited institutionalized security. It therefore exhibits the features of a suspended and exclusionary form of cultural capital. In this sense, within current modes of youth subject formation, meritocracy no longer operates only through an explicit morality of effort. Rather, it is repackaged through an “aesthetics of songchi”, reshaping the routes and forms of subject discipline in a softer and more implicit manner.

Key words: “songchi”, youth, subject formation, symbolic capital, self-governance, meritocracy