Understanding “Little but Certain Happiness”: The Lost Generation in Taiwan

• In Event: Personality, Generation, and Political Behavior in Taiwan

Abstract

“Little but certain happiness”, a term which originally referred to the cheerful feeling of discovering tiny surprises in daily life, was first proposed by the well-known Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in his best-selling book in 2005. The idea, instead of attracting attention in Japan, has gone viral in Taiwan, where the young generation has been deemed to pursue a low-desire lifestyle and hold passive attitudes to the future, and has become a label to describe the Taiwanese youth in recent years. While little of the idea and the phenomenon above is discussed by the existing research, this article aims to provide a more qualitative comparative analysis and examine how and why pursuing “little but certain happiness” becomes Taiwanese youth’s generational characteristic by critically reviewing the previous literature and analysing the survey data in comparison with China and Hong Kong.

This study argues that there are three interacted sources leading Taiwanese youth to pursue “little but certain happiness” in recent decades, including the negative prospect for achieving upward mobility, the increasing economic dependency on parental generation, and the relatively low perceived socioeconomic and political threat. Despite that fact that the first two issues are more challenging for Taiwan over other countries, they are still in some extent common problems in Asian societies, while the latter stands as an unique factor and plays a key role in Taiwan’s case comparing with China and Hong Kong. According to a survey across three Chinese societies in 2017, Taiwan’s young generation generally holds a more negative view to their future and the chances of achieving upward mobility, which is deemed to be caused by the relative deprivation. Being similar to Japan, where huge amount of youth financially rely on parental generation since the “lost decades”, plenty of Taiwanese youth have thus lost the motivation to become independent. They then turn to seek simple life and little heart-warming moments in daily routine instead of fighting for big achievements. Different from Hong Kong where majority of youth either involve in politics or plan to migrate due to the recent political tensions, and China where majority of youth have relatively higher motivations to struggle for careers due to its growing economy, Taiwan’s youth are generally more satisfied with the status quo due to its relatively stable society and advanced economy. Pursuing “little but certain happiness” hence becomes a common view of Taiwanese youth and a generational consciousness of “little but certain happiness” thus emerges in recent decades.

Broadly, this article takes the first step to address the creation and development of the increasingly popularized idea “little but certain happiness”, which has been labelled to the young generation in Taiwan for their passive attitudes and low-desire lifestyle, and examines how and why it becomes a generational characteristic of young generation in Taiwan in comparison with China and Hong Kong, to fill the gap for the study on the generational consciousness of the new young generation in the 21 century’s Taiwan by offering an emerging comparative case study that builds upon social generation literature.

Author

• Hugo Tai, University of Oxford