Happy loser: China woman whose ‘OK to be a loser’ video went viral last year remains unshaken in belief ditches well-paid job to be free again
- Young woman’s 17-minute late-night talk with friend about failures went viral on mainland last year
- She landed a good job in 2023 but realised it did not match her life goals
A young Chinese woman who went viral last year because she lamented that “it is OK to be a loser” said she no longer considers herself a failure despite having had a particularly challenging year.
Last year, the 28-year-old woman, who goes by the name Wanwan, published a 17-minute late-night talk with her friend Chaochao – also a pseudonym – in which the two women who graduated from top Chinese universities in 2017 said they lived lives “full of failure”.
At that point in her life, Wanwan had held over a dozen jobs, none of which she found meaningful. She had also failed the postgraduate entrance exams and only had savings of 5,000 yuan (US$700).
Chaochao, who had a master’s degree, could not land a career as a scriptwriter and was cleaning tables at a hotpot restaurant to support herself.
In the talk, they called themselves “losers” but optimistically encouraged each other – as well as others who were down on their luck – by saying having nothing meant “a life full of choices”.
As the year passed, Wanwan tried to leverage her viral video into a career as an online influencer but quickly learned the unsteady income created anxiety, so she gave up that dream.
She would eventually land a job as a short video creator for a large internet company in Beijing but quit after two months because she got in a car accident and realised: “Dying on the way to work is a miserable way to go. I don’t want to die before experiencing the world.”
