2025 Year-End Special | Introduction: Winter is Coming, How to Get Through It?

In the late autumn of 1929, after a long period of booming manufacturing, the U.S. stock market suddenly crashed on October 29, ushering in a decade-long Great Depression. The ensuing wave of unemployment, factory bankruptcies, and massive destruction of agricultural products became part of history. Many students remember the shock they felt when they first read in their textbooks that "milk turned the Mississippi River white."

Looking back a century later, people find that history always seems to follow a cycle. In 1997 and 2008, the world experienced another large-scale economic crisis, both of which occurred after relatively long periods of prosperity, with localized financial collapses triggering a profound global recession.

Today, history seems to be repeating itself at an accelerated pace. Since 2018, the interplay of events such as trade wars, the pandemic, and localized conflicts has caused the overall booming trend of the 2010s to take a sharp turn for the worse. Although the financial markets have not yet collapsed, an unprecedented and widespread economic crisis is quietly brewing. At the same time, generative AI, spearheaded by ChatGPT, is beginning to transform human work and life, posing an existential threat to some transactional jobs.

Shifting global power structures coupled with productivity changes have triggered a contraction in both personnel and economic activity. This autumn, led by large corporations such as Nestlé and Novo Nordisk, the food and biopharmaceutical industries have implemented massive layoffs affecting thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. This wave of layoffs has not only stumped recent graduates but has also significantly impacted many experienced professionals and their families.

Many signs indicate that the cold snowflakes have begun to fall on everyone.

Winter itself is not unfamiliar, and the cyclical decline is inevitable. The rise and fall of prosperity and the return of good fortune are self-evident laws of this world. Beneath the ice of winter often lies the energy of revival, nurturing the next prosperity as the ice melts and the snow thaws.

However, this spreading winter not only seems to obscure the bottom, but also blurs the future in people's eyes. The young and middle-aged of our time—the generation that should be the backbone of society—are beginning to fall into a collective bewilderment: they don't know to what extent their jobs will be replaced by smarter automation or AI, they can't see how many of the successful career paths their industry predecessors have followed can be replicated in themselves, and they can't even say how to live, or simply survive, in this era full of unknowns and chaos.

So, how can we protect our physical and mental health and get through this winter with the least possible cost?

This year-end special feature on the alliance's official WeChat account in 2025 contacted senior members with rich experience in the workplace both at home and abroad, and who personally experienced the economic turmoil following the impact of the 2020 pandemic. They were invited to share how they learned and learned step by step in the new environment, eventually transforming into outstanding professionals, and to offer advice on how individuals can protect themselves and seek long-term development during a period of economic downturn.

For millions of years, humanity has faced countless unknowns and threats in its evolution, yet it has ultimately succeeded in thriving on Earth. This is because we are able to think, cooperate, and innovate to overcome adversity, and at critical moments of life and death, we always exert all our strength—finding paths where none existed before and turning the impossible into the possible. Of course, a bit of good luck also plays a part.

If we can't see the direction of spring, let's arm ourselves in the biting snow and go together to search for and create.