"Quantity" refers to "involution", that is, after a cultural model reaches a certain final form, it can neither be stabilized nor transformed into a new form, but can only become more complicated internally.

Through the Internet, many college students use it to refer to irrational internal competition or "voluntary" competition. Now it refers to the phenomenon that peers compete for limited resources and make more efforts, which leads to the decline of personal "income-effort ratio", which can be regarded as "inflation" of efforts.

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Speaking of "involution", the earliest "source" is a few pictures of famous schools.

Several pictures of college students exploding their circle of friends are like this: some people are reading books on bicycles, and some people's dormitory beds are full of books. These photos were first circulated among the principals of Peking University and Tsinghua. After that, popular words such as "riding a bike to watch a computer" and "Tsinghua Wang Juan" appeared in hot searches, and related facial expressions also appeared in many social software for college students.