In the “City of Rat Race,” where working 996 is considered a blessing and slacking off a crime, Liu Song was the most forgettable of countless office drones in the CBD financial district. He wore Bluetooth earbuds to pretend he was listening in meetings, revised PowerPoints at three in the morning, and wouldn’t even take a day off with a fever for fear of losing his perfect-attendance bonus. He had become a machine running on a program called “rat race.” Until one day, the pressure piled up so high that his brain short-circuited. At the quarterly review, in front of his boss and coworkers, he suddenly lost it.
“What’s the point of these stupid KPIs?!”
“Friday team-building is just overtime in disguise! I’m not going!”
“I’m going home on time to feed my cat! If you want to compete, go ahead!”
His sudden outburst unexpectedly tore away the hypocritical mask of the rat-race world. Liu Song discovered that when he started dealing with work and life in absurd, rebellious, and unconventional ways, the rules that had once left him suffocating began to crumble one by one. After he refused pointless overtime, his efficiency actually soared. When he deliberately slacked off in front of his workaholic colleague, the other man even began to hesitate. He even used his “insane ramblings” to open the eyes of more people trapped in the rat-race cycle...
From a “madman” everyone avoided to an unwitting “spiritual leader” of the anti-rat-race movement, Liu Song’s unhinged rebellion became an absurd remedy that helped countless people escape the abyss of overwork. This is the story of an office drone using “abnormality” to fight an “abnormal world,” and a darkly comic adventure about breaking free of conventions and finding one’s true self.
