The idea of low material desire, low consumption and refusing to work, marry and have children, concluded as a "lying down" lifestyle, recently struck a chord with many young Chinese who are eager to take pause to breathe in this fast-paced and highly-competitive society.

Many millennials (千禧一代) and generation Zs complained to the Global Times that burdens, including work stress, family disputes (纷争) and financial strains, have pushed them "against the wall". They said they hate the "involution (内卷)," joking that they would rather give up some of what they have than get trapped in an endless competition against peers.

"Instead of always following the 'virtues' of struggle, endure and sacrifice to bear the stresses, they prefer a temporary lying down as catharsis (宣泄) and adjustment," said a scholar. "It is no wonder that some young people, under the growing pressures from child-raising to paying the mortgage (按揭) today, would try to live in a simple way and leave the worries behind."

Interestingly, the majority of millennials and Gen Zs reached by the Global Times, who claim to be big fans of the lying down philosophy, acknowledged that they only accept a temporary lying down as a short rest. It is true that with the great improvement of living conditions, some Chinese youth have partially lost the spirit of hardship and are not willing to bear too much hard work. But in fact, lying down is not entirely comfortable. Young people who lie down always feel guilty about their constant loss of morale (士气) far beyond their reach.

"Young people on campus have both aspirations and confusion about their future, but most of us have rejected setting ourselves up in chains to waste opportunities and challenges," a postgraduate student told the Global Times. "It's no use running away. I have to 'stand up' and face the reality sooner or later."

If you remember anything before the age of 3, your brain only puts together bits of reality that you've learned as you've grown up, according to a new research. In the largest study of its kind, researchers asked people about their earliest memory and at what age they believe it took place. They found that a surprising number of people claimed to remember things from their first years of life. But scientists agree that our brain isn't developed enough to keep memories until we're three years old, so researchers wanted to know why so many people insist they remember something before then.

Of 6, 641 participants, 37. 4 percent said they had their first memory before the age of 2. Of those, 893 said their first memories were from the period before they turned 1. Participants' answers were analyzed in terms of their age, language, the content of the memory and the nature of the memory.

" When we looked through the answers from participants, we found that a lot of these first ‘memories' were frequently related to infancy and a typical example would be a memory based around a baby carriage, " said Professor Martin Conway at City University of London.

This means that many of these " fictional" memories are only our minds mixing up what we know about babies and what we actually experienced as a baby. They also found that older people were more likely to report remembering a " fictional" early memory. Researchers couldn't determine why our brains do this but suggested it comes from a personal need to have a complete description of our lives. They added that a positive self-narrative can lead to a better life.

Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers，small，tightly knit(联系)groups developed their own patterns of  speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12, 000 languages between them. Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English，

Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

At present, the world has about 6, 800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1, 000; Africa 2, 400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800.The median number(中位数) of speakers is mere 6,000, which that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Already well over 400 of the total of 6, 800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon （ eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.