100 Reasons the City Makes Young People Want to Leave – Which One Is Yours?

Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme was originally designed to build a relationship of mutual learning and collaboration between young people eager to return to the countryside to practise ecological agriculture and seasoned pioneers who have already spent years working the land, helping the next generation of farmers reduce the trial-and-error costs of farming.

But we never expected that, among the nearly one hundred applications we received, most people had little to no prior connection to agriculture. Many of them had already been walking the path toward urban elite status — some had studied at prestigious overseas universities and earned master’s degrees; some had worked at major tech companies for years; others had pursued intriguing entrepreneurial ventures. Of course, there were also ordinary office workers navigating city life and students struggling through their academic pursuits.

● The farm mentors in this round of the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme also shared photographs from ten, even thirty, years ago. Full of youthful ambition in their early twenties, they studied and worked in cities — yet every path led to the same destination: each of them became an ecological smallholder farmer. Can familiar Foodthink readers recognise them?

● Sister Yan Ping from Guigang in Guangxi is one of this year’s farm mentors. After graduating from high school in the 1990s, she moved to Guangdong, where she worked for more than twenty years. She returned to her hometown in 2017 to take up ecological agriculture. In July 2022, while Foodthink was conducting climate change research in Guangxi, we spent the night lodged in her little bamboo hut on the farm.

● Guo Rui from Yinlin Farm in Guangzhou graduated from South China Agricultural University and was among the very first students to move into the new dormitory block. This round’s applicant, Guorong, recognised the dormitory at first glance; almost twenty years later, he has lived in the very same room his senior once occupied. He also served as a farm mentor in both rounds of the internship programme.

Why do they want to leave the city, step off their established career or academic track, and head to the countryside to learn to be a farmer?

When asked why they left their last job, this is what they said.

Chaoyan

Female, 34, bachelor’s degree in automation engineering, currently unemployed

I have worked in IT testing for years. The workload was relentless — I often had to pull all-nighters to meet project deadlines, which took a severe toll on my body. The stress was so crushing that I lay awake all night, unable to sleep. Feeling I simply could not keep going any longer, I resigned voluntarily. It has been over a year since I left Beijing and returned to my hometown.

Lisa

Female, 28, bachelor’s degree in finance and master’s in taxation. After graduation she spent two years in finance and audit before leaving her job.

At the accounting firm, I was responsible for producing audit reports and guiding companies through IPOs. I was posted long-term in other cities, living a 996 schedule — working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. I had no personal time to attend to my life or my health. My spine and eyes had started to give me trouble, and the pressure of everyday life left me feeling torn. I wanted to try a different life while I was still young.

Guojing

Female, 26, completed her bachelor’s degree in sociology in Europe before being accepted into a master’s programme in sociology/anthropology at a prestigious American university. She is currently on a gap year.

I realised that I neither enjoyed nor was suited to research and academia. During my first semester of a master’s programme at a research-intensive university, I was told that the first step in writing and thinking was to enter a dialogue with the three most brilliant scholars in your field — to identify gaps and new perspectives in a short time, with impeccable formatting and precise professional language.

This way of writing and thinking — gulping knowledge down whole without truly digesting it — choked off my throat and my desire. I had fought so hard to break free of authority, only to find myself back under its verdict over my thinking. My body and mind revolted ceaselessly, and I had no choice but to stop.

Ludazhuo

Female, 27, diploma in Western culinary arts. She worked in the pastry kitchen at a five-star hotel and on international cruise ships. In 2019 she started her own business, dedicated to nature education and environmental education in her hometown.

Although the pandemic hit shortly after I started my business, fortunately the work I do is all something I love, with plenty of freedom and room for creativity, and I can make a decent living. But I still often feel powerless — as though my efforts are not enough to push the business to its next stage, and that there are so many areas where I need to keep learning and growing.

At the same time, I feel I have not yet found my life’s purpose. I am not yet certain enough of my direction, so I want to try more things, hoping for new discoveries.

A-Yue

Male, 25. After earning a college diploma in marketing, he sold insurance and worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative before leaving his job.

An unsuitable workplace plus constant travel. My role involved sales and after-sales service for hospitals, which in my hometown boils down to giving gifts, drinking, and greasing the wheels. After 2022, the company began expanding into county-level hospitals, where nepotism runs even deeper and the travel became even more frequent. I want to learn and practise ecological agriculture techniques and, if possible, return to my hometown to settle and start a business.

Yancha

Female, 26. After completing her bachelor’s degree in environment and sustainability in the UK, she returned home and worked in succession for two environmental and agricultural non-profit organisations. She is about to leave her current role.

When it comes to work, I weigh three key areas: basic needs (salary, benefits, holidays), growth needs (broadening horizons, building capabilities, and the potential for accumulating knowledge), and self-fulfilment (how much value I can create for the work itself and for the role or organisation as a whole).

I want all three to be roughly in balance, but from my observations over the past few months, my current job — the one I am about to leave — cannot achieve that balance.

Liuyue

Female, 32, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. After graduation she worked in human resources. Her department is about to be dissolved.

I believe work exists to support a better life. I want to spend my finite years doing more of what I love and what brings genuine benefit to others. Over the years in HR I have also found a great deal of fulfilment.

But owing to historical factors such as changes in the company’s organisational structure, I was gradually marginalised over the past two years, and it became almost impossible for my abilities and achievements to be recognised by the company. When my department was disbanded at the end of 2023, I already had a FIRE plan in place (Financial Independence, Retire Early), and I decided to use this “optimisation” as an opportunity to open a new chapter in life.

Mubai

Female, 26, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from the UK, currently unemployed

In the various roles I held after graduating, I was essentially exploring different kinds of work within the environmental field — I worked at an environmental NGO and served as a chemistry teacher at a progressive school, helping students understand the ideas and practices behind sustainable development.

Rather than teaching, I felt I was better suited to finding my own way, to experimenting and exploring solutions to problems. So I joined a start-up building a global bulk waste recycling platform. Although the company’s stated mission was to match waste streams with the best destinations, it did not, in essence, address the root problem of the sheer volume of waste produced or the culture of consumerism. I came to see that this was not a place where my ideals could take root. Nor was I content simply to do better international trade — I kept wanting a more thorough way of tackling the problem at its source.

Looking back on my earlier roles, they had all been within the environmental field, but each one dealt with problems downstream. It was only when I rekindled the idea of permaculture that had been planted in my mind several years ago that I felt the direction I truly wanted: a closed-loop system that addresses waste and wastewater at source, where nothing is discarded because every material can be cycled back into nature.

On a personal level, after more than a decade of studying and working furiously in front of a screen, I concluded that life need not be lived this way. After attending courses in natural building and permaculture design in China, I grew even more certain that being out in nature — even toiling in the fields, facing the earth with my back to the sky — is the state I find most comfortable. The pandemic sharpened my sense of urgency about all kinds of crises, social, environmental, and personal. We ought to build resilience against hardship and learn to produce healthy, safe food ourselves.

Xinyi

Female, 31, bachelor’s degree in German. She worked as a chef at upscale restaurants in Beijing and Canada, then left her post to return to her hometown and rest.

The restaurant where I worked had a number of long-standing management and operational problems that were never properly resolved — things like inefficient waste sorting, food waste, and chronic understaffing. And amid such a relentless pace of work, questions began to form in my mind:

Why does fresh produce from small farms end up as a burden the kitchen cannot digest?

Why are gifted colleagues unable to put their strengths to use at work?

Why does my once-boundless passion for food and cooking seem to be fading, day by day?

In the restaurant, we felt like nothing more than machines on the verge of sputtering to a halt from mental or physical exhaustion, yet forced to keep grinding on regardless. I had foreseen these pressures and steeled myself for them, but after struggling to steady myself and making every change I could manage within my reach, the questions only grew deeper — until my body began sending its own signals too: perhaps it was time to rest.

So I chose to resign, return home for the time being to be with my family, and go after the things I still want to try while I am young — things like volunteering with environmental and children’s causes, and this ecological farm internship.

Beyond these reflective life stories, this year’s applicants also shared plenty of the everyday dilemmas that young professionals across China tend to face, such as:

physical and mental difficulty adjusting to high-intensity, repetitive, low-paid work;

a desire for a change of environment;

my heart is simply not in it;

having a vague goal and making progress by process of elimination;

fundamental disagreements with a line manager about how the work should be done;

wanting to gain knowledge through hands-on practice in a different role;

an inability to balance work and life;

finding the logic of business uninteresting — especially at FMCG brands — and feeling there was nothing more to learn, so she resigned to go back to studying;

I came down with COVID a few days ago and had a rough time of it. Going through that made me realise that although I am fairly content with my life right now, there is nothing left that I truly need from it — so I thought it was time to start a new exploration.

limited room for personal growth, and a growing understanding, forged through the work itself, of what I do not want to do.

My previous job was in a field I loved and was good at, and I had always worked remotely. But then they insisted on being in the office — roughly an hour and a half each way from my home. That was simply too much time wasted, so I quit without a second thought.

And finally, I would like to share the story of a truly “Buddhist-like” soul.

Xiuxiu

Female, 30, master’s degree in clinical medicine. Spent a year volunteering at a Buddhist temple.

The reason I left the temple was that I had planned to sit the doctoral entrance exam in a different discipline — a joint programme in religious studies at a certain university. The application was ultimately unsuccessful. In any case, simply pursuing a PhD was never what my heart truly desired, and religious studies as an academic discipline is a world away from religion itself, so I lacked the motivation. In the summer of 2022, I decided to stop trying for a doctorate.

Over the past two years I have cooked all my own meals and shopped for groceries regularly, which has given me a deep, personal sense of food safety issues. I feel that rather than doing work that is entirely superfluous for a wage, only to entrust my food safety — my very life — to other people’s hands, I would rather roll up my sleeves and create things myself.

This week, applicants who have passed the first interview for the internship programme will complete a mutual selection process with the host farms. Once pairings are confirmed, 15 of these participants will head to the farms one after another, embarking on their journey to learn to farm. Foodthink will continue to report on their experiences during the internship.

If the stories of these young people strike a chord, please do leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Oh, and why have they chosen to spend three months — or even a full year — interning at small-scale ecological farms to become farmers? All shall be revealed in the next instalment.

Ecological Farm Internship Programme Series ▼

Programme coordinator: Ma Xiaochao

Editor: Tianle

Exit series photographs: Zhang Xiaoshu

Published by Foodthink