Throughout our lives, we maintain several relationships typically with family, friends, coworkers and romantic partners. However, there is one relationship that we may overlook: our own. Self-love may be described as the recognition of one’s value or goodness. That involves embracing yourself for who you are, prioritising your needs, creating healthy boundaries and forgiving yourself when necessary. However, how-to-love-yourself instruction is ubiquitous nowadays since it cannot be predicted how far to go in performing an act of self-love. Now, a new phenomenon known as “tou gan”, a type of self-love, is gaining popularity among young Chinese people.
According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), many people are deliberately derailing their lives by living in secrecy. This lifestyle term, tou gan, literally translates as emotional theft.
The expression implies a secretive way of living that involves little actions of resistance to go around social norms. This unusual lifestyle has evolved into a sort of self-love.
As per SCMP, Tou gan adherents, for instance, may decide to quit work early in order to defy the prevalent societal norm of putting in extra hours. They may also order oily takeaway in violation of a healthy eating regimen.
According to the news agency, a woman from the province of Guangdong in southern China practices emotional theft and never informs her parents how much she earns, something that is considered disrespectful in many Chinese households.
She has been working for six years, and every time her mother inquires about her pay, she consistently responds that it is 13,000 yuan (Rs 1,50,000).
“The number is made up, but it is tethered to reality. I would never tell her the exact amount,” the woman told SCMP.
Because her mother values economic living, the woman doesn’t want her mother to be aware of her monthly spending habits. If her mother finds any of her purchases to be excessively extravagant, she may receive criticism.
Her mother estimates that she will have enough money saved up eventually to purchase a house and a car.
“But I hardly have any savings. So “derailing” what I tell my mother is literally a lifesaver,” she added.
Some practitioners, on the other hand, look for minimal places—sometimes literally small spaces—where they have total control over their lives. This year, a woman from Shenzhen, Guangdong province, going by the last name Chang made the decision to move out of her boyfriend’s room.
Sharing a bed is a common assumption among cohabiting couples.
“I wanted to ‘steal’ some personal time from our daily routine of living as a couple,” Chang told SCMP.
She had an “unprecedented sense of freedom” because of the seclusion and autonomy of her own spaces, the news outlet added.
A form of emotional theft for 20-year-old Chinese girl Xu entails maintaining a private social media profile. She revealed to SCMP that, in rural China, where she was raised, travelling abroad is regarded as a luxury. To make sure her friends and family weren’t envious, she uploaded the photos on a private profile when she was in South Korea.
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