Zhao Weixiang, 22, a biology student in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi, posted a digitally altered image of himself as a bird perched atop a telephone pole.

“No more studying, no more studying, be a bird,” the caption said.

In his third year of college, he was feeling the pressure of upcoming exams that would determine whether he could get into his desired biology graduate program and the prospect of starting a career in a competitive field.

Many young people in China are becoming disillusioned because the story they were told from a young age – that they would have a bright future if they studied and worked hard – looks more doubtful as China’s economy slows, said Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, and an expert on Chinese society.

“They had very high expectations about themselves, about China and about the world in general. And then when they graduated from college and when they became adults, they became victims of the slowdown,” Xiang said.

“They started asking: ‘Why did I study so hard? What for? I sacrificed so much joy and happiness when I was young.’”

To cope with this frustration, some people have adopted the mentality of “lying flat,” or favouring a restful life over one defined by constant striving and hustling. They protest in small ways, like wearing casual outfits to work instead of business attire. A handful have left Chinese megacities for Dali, a southwestern city known as an oasis for disaffected youth.

The bird trend is another manifestation of this disillusionment, and enables young people to “have a moment of being lighthearted” without opting out of the rat race, Xiang said.

He said he saw the implicit message of the trend as this: “I don’t see any alternatives right now, but I can still imagine what a free life can be.”

So, do young people who pretend to be birds achieve a sense of freedom and lightheartedness?

Yes and no. One problem is that they can’t actually fly, of course.

Maybe because of the pressure of his exams, said Wang, the finance student, he felt more like a “pet parrot, one that’s kept in a cage and spends most of its time on the one perch its owner gave it”.

Zhao, the biology student, said he was also keenly aware of the limits of his avian form.

“I felt like a flightless bird that could only grip the railing and gaze into the distance,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.