Your Generation Found an 84-Year-Old Cambridge Professor on Xiaohongshu. What He Is Really Giving You Is a Method.

This is our reading of Henry Ren's dispatch for Bloomberg Weekend, 2026-10-08: China's Young People Are Turning to an 84-Year-Old Cambridge Professor. Read the original →

Start with the facts.

In 2025, an 84-year-old emeritus professor of social anthropology at Cambridge, Alan Macfarlane, began posting short videos on Xiaohongshu. Seventeen months later, more than 2.5 million people were following him. You gave him a name. You call him Dumbledore.

He himself did not take it seriously. In the Bloomberg piece he said, roughly, that it should have been impossible for an elderly British academic to interest young Chinese women on the other side of the world. But you were serious. One of you wrote this in his comment section, and the whole piece quoted it: "Because we are very lost; the younger generation is extremely lost amidst various macro factors."

That sentence is not one person. That sentence is the same month urban youth unemployment in China hit 19%, the GDP forecast slipped under 5%, and a large wave of university graduates discovered that AI had already taken the entry-level job they had been training for. And there is a word for the shape of your work life now, neijuan, "rolling inwards": the same group of people working harder and harder for a reward that is not growing, and may be shrinking. This is not your personal defect of character. This is a specific historical moment, landing on your generation in a specific way.

You are lost because lost is a correct reading.

But acknowledging only that is not enough. The thing Macfarlane does well is the next step.

His three-step method.

He calls the method social therapy. Every time someone leaves a "what should I do" question under one of his videos, he walks the same three steps.

Step one, acknowledge the problem is real and is not just yours. His first sentence is almost always some version of "this is presumably quite a widespread anxiety and worry for young people in China." It sounds plain. But that sentence does something most adults rarely do: it moves the young person watching him out of the room labeled "something must be wrong with me" and into the room labeled "there are many of us here." Changing rooms is what gives you the strength to hear anything else.

Step two, hand over a measure of hope that is not empty. Not "it will all work out." Just: before you decide that your situation is permanent, give yourself one more move. He does not promise. He says: there is one more step available.

Step three, offer a concrete, small, doable-today next step. A real example. Someone asked him: my parents and my relatives all expect me to get into a top university; I do not know how to face their expectations and everything they have given me. His answer was to have the conversation out loud, using a specific sentence. He suggested a formula, more precisely rendered in your wisdom card today, that in English goes:

> "I probably won't, and this doesn't mean that I don't love you and I haven't tried my best." , Alan Macfarlane, via Henry Ren, Bloomberg Weekend, 2026-10-08

The sentence is not elegant. It is not inspirational. But it does two hard things at once. It acknowledges reality. It preserves the relationship. It does not announce a surrender. It takes "I am trying my best" and "the result may not be what you wanted" and lets them be said side by side.

Why this works.

It works, and this matters, not because of Cambridge, not because of the accent, and not even because of the age. It works because of the order.

Most adults, hearing a young person tell them about something hard, jump straight to step three. "You should just do X." They skip step one. The step they skipped is the sentence "this is hard, and many people are also carrying it." Without that sentence, no matter how correct the advice that follows, the body of the young person cannot hear it. In that moment, their body is busy defending them against a deeper, scarier question: "am I the broken one?" You cannot open the next door until that door is open first.

As a note, this "change the room before you can walk forward" mechanic was not invented by Macfarlane. It is the same coin as learned helplessness, which psychologist Martin Seligman found in a lab in 1967 and then spent his second career teaching people how to walk out of. One uses science. The other uses conversation. The core is the same: give someone who has been pressed down a long time, and now feels "my moves do not matter," the experience, one more time, of "I moved, and something actually moved back."

You can run this method on yourself tonight.

Think of it as a three-line card.

Line one, write to yourself: "Right now I feel ______. This is not only mine." Give the heaviest thing you are carrying today a name. Panic. Stuck. Shame. Pressed flat by what the people who love you want you to be. Write it down. Then remind yourself that this feeling is, in this hour, happening in uncountable other twenty-year-olds like you. You are not the broken one.

Line two, write to yourself: "Before I decide I am done, I will give myself one more step." Not "I will be fine." Just: one more step.

Line three, write to yourself: "The smallest thing I can do today, or tomorrow, is ______." Not a big plan. Not a life pivot. The smallest step. Send someone a text. Write fifty words. Walk for twenty minutes. Do one problem. Tidy one corner of the room. Small enough that no part of you can refuse it.

When you have written it, keep the card next to your hand, or near your phone lock screen, or on the first page of your notes. It is not magic. It is a three-step shape you can walk again and again.

One last thing.

The reason Macfarlane has 2.5 million followers is not that he has a Cambridge answer to hand you. He does not. What he is doing is taking something that should have come from your own grandmother, or a neighborhood elder, or an uncle who had time, and that for a mix of reasons did not reach you, and he is passing it from his small Cambridge room, through a screen, into your hand.

What that means is that the method itself does not belong to Cambridge. It can belong to you. You can start using it on yourself tonight. On a friend next week. Slowly it will stop being the thing a strange English man does and start being something you do.

This is the thing your generation actually needs. Not a correct answer. A way to stand up without falling over in front of a big, unclear, often unfair reality. Macfarlane gave you a card. The next few decades are yours to practice it in.

### Questions to sit with

1. If you had to give a name to the heaviest feeling you are carrying this week, what would it be? Once you have named it, ask yourself: is this likely happening in many other people your age right now?

2. If tonight you had to write one sentence you could actually say to your parents, a sentence that is honest about where you are AND does not pretend they have not loved you, what would it be? It does not need to be pretty. Only true.

3. Among the adults you know, who is the most Macfarlane-like, the one who, when told something hard, acknowledges first and offers help second? How do you think they learned to do that? Could you begin learning the same move, starting this week?