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By Mihar Dias April 2025
If you're in your twenties and living in Malaysia right now, chances are you’ve felt it — that quiet sense of fatigue creeping into your daily life. Not just the inflation at the mamak, or the endless job applications that go nowhere, or even the TikTok doomscrolling that leaves you a little more numb each night. It's something deeper. A heavy feeling that the world you were promised doesn’t exist — or if it ever did, it's long gone.
In China, young people have found a name for this feeling: garbage time.
The term comes from basketball — it’s the final minutes of a game whose outcome is already decided. The best players sit. The coach shrugs. The crowd starts leaving. Nothing you do now will change the score.
And weirdly, it fits. In China, the economy that once sprinted ahead has slowed down.
Property giants like Evergrande have collapsed. Youth unemployment is near 17%. Millions are downsizing their dreams — choosing second-hand over luxury, peace of mind over prestige.
Phrases like tang ping (lying flat) and run xue (the study of how to leave) have become everyday talk. It’s not dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s a generation choosing not to play a game that stopped making sense.
Here in Malaysia? We know that feeling all too well. Except our garbage time doesn’t follow decades of prosperity. We’re living in the aftermath of dreams we never fully got to chase.
A generation raised on the promise of progress now finds itself priced out of homes, underpaid, and often undervalued. You get a degree and are told to be grateful for a job that pays RM3,000 a month.
The rich get tax breaks; you get "exposure." And all the while, you're told to hustle harder, keep calm, and wait for some national miracle that never quite arrives.
And to make things worse, the rest of the world is catching the same fever.
Global trade, once the engine of rising prosperity, is now caught in a whirlwind of tariff wars and political posturing. The US and China are at it again.
Tariffs here, sanctions there — and the rest of the world, including Malaysia, gets pulled into the undertow. Imports are more expensive. Exports face barriers. Companies are cutting back or playing it safe. Uncertainty is the only constant.
All of it creates a sense of stuckness — like we're caught in the waiting room of history, unsure if something better is coming or if this is it.
But here’s the thing: garbage time doesn't have to mean wasted time. In fact, it might be the most important time of all.
Because when the old ways stop working, you get to imagine new ones. When the scoreboard no longer matters, you get to play your own game.
You don’t have to live your life according to someone else’s outdated blueprint. You don’t need a title or a corner office to feel fulfilled. You don’t need to own a condo or wear a brand to know you’ve made it.
What if the real win isn’t climbing a broken ladder — but walking away and building something of your own?
Start small. Grow your own food. Launch that business your relatives don’t understand. Write stories. Build apps. Learn skills no one taught you in school. Make art. Teach kids. Travel if you can, or bring the world to your community if you can’t.
The world is chaotic, yes. But it’s also wide open. The old systems — whether in China, Malaysia, or the West — are cracking. That’s scary. But cracks also let in light.
And if you look closely, you’ll see more and more young people like you choosing to create rather than wait. Choosing to build in garbage time — because they know something precious can still grow from the scraps.
So no — your time is not garbage. This moment, as uncertain and frustrating as it may be, is a blank page. And you are the pen.
History might not be watching. But that doesn’t mean what you do now doesn’t matter. On the contrary — this is where it all begins.
You were born for more than just survival. You were born to rebuild.
So take a deep breath. The old game is over. Yours is just beginning.
Mihar Dias is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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