Why Young People Are Lying Flat and Putting Off Kids :(

When I look at my friends and the younger engineers around me, I keep seeing the same pattern, and I want to write it down.

Smart, hard-working people are quietly giving up on the "normal" plan: buy a home, get married, have kids. Not because they are lazy. Because the math does not work.

The math of a home

In Q1 2026, apartment prices were up about 26.5% year over year in Hanoi and 18% in Ho Chi Minh City (Savills). The Ministry of Construction says housing prices rise 10-15% a year while wages rise 6-7%.

Now take a skilled worker earning around 9.7-9.8 million VND a month. One square meter costs 91-100 million VND. That is about 9-10 months of pay for a single square meter. A 50 m2 apartment is roughly 40 years of full income if you spend nothing else. Numbeo puts the home-price-to-income ratio at 31-32 in the two big cities.

Prices run ahead of pay every year. Saving harder does not close that gap. It only delays the moment you realize it never closes.

"Lying flat" is a rational response

When people say young people "lie flat", it sounds like a character flaw. I think it is closer to a calculation. If working twice as hard still does not get you a home, why burn out for it?

China gave this attitude a name, tang ping, years ago. Today the pressure there looks heavier: youth unemployment (ages 16-24, excluding students) hit 17.9% in July 2026, with an estimated 12.7 million new graduates entering the market that summer. A degree used to be the ticket. Now a lot of people hold the ticket and still cannot get in.

Vietnam's numbers look milder on paper, with youth unemployment at about 9% in Q4 2025. But a headline rate does not capture what my circle experiences: graduates with good grades from top universities who send out dozens of applications and compete against hundreds of candidates for each role. That part is what I see, not something I can prove with an official statistic.

Insecurity comes before children

People often explain falling birth rates as a change in values. I think a simpler explanation is financial insecurity. If you might lose your job next quarter and cannot afford a home, having a child feels like a bet you are not allowed to place.

The numbers fit this story, with one caveat I want to be honest about. Vietnam's national fertility rate in 2025 was 1.93, a slight rise from 1.91, though still below the 2.1 replacement level. But in Ho Chi Minh City, where housing is among the most expensive, it was just 1.51. That is a correlation, not proof, but it points in the direction you would expect.

In China, births fell to 7.92 million in 2025 from 9.54 million the year before, and the population shrank by 3.39 million, the fourth decline in a row.

I do not think people stopped wanting families. I think they stopped feeling safe enough to start one.

AI and the missing apprenticeship

There is one more thing I feel personally, and I want to label it as opinion. Juniors used to learn by doing the small, boring tasks. Those are exactly the tasks AI tools now do quickly and for free. If the entry-level work disappears, where does the next generation get its first years of practice? I have no data for this, only what I notice around me. But it makes the ladder feel even shorter.

What I do not know

I do not have a solution. I am not sure anyone does. Housing supply, wages, job security, and how we use AI all have to move, and none of them is in the hands of one young engineer.

What I do know is that when a whole generation makes the same "unreasonable" choice, it is worth asking whether the choice is unreasonable or the system is. I am still figuring out which one I believe, and I would rather say so than pretend I have the answer.

Sources: Vietcetera / Savills / Numbeo, Baochinhphu (Vietnam TFR), Vietnam Hoi Nhap (youth unemployment), Caixin (China births), Qatar Tribune (China youth unemployment).