One evening after work, my research assistant and I left the lab just in time to be swallowed by Shanghai’s evening rush hour. Our Uber car crawled forward in dense traffic. Shanghai keeps expanding outward, but accommodating a city of nearly thirty million people is never easy. Food delivery riders on electric scooters wove through the traffic at remarkable speed.
Since the pandemic, delivery work has become one of the few booming sectors during the economic slowdown. In most parts of the city, you can get almost any meal within thirty minutes, and most daily necessities —from furniture to paper towels— arrive the same day or the next. What makes this convenience possible is an enormous workforce registered on delivery platforms, moving through the city at a tempo that often feels several times faster than everyone else’s.
As our car changed lanes, a delivery rider suddenly cut in front of us, accelerating through a flashing yellow light and making a sharp turn at the very last second. Our driver slammed on the brakes and erupted in complaints. After a full day of driving passengers, he was clearly exhausted; the near-miss tipped him into visible agitation. He began venting about how delivery scooters disrupted traffic and endangered everyone on the road.
“Do you know,” he said heatedly, “just earlier this year, one of our company’s drivers hit a delivery rider. It wasn’t our driver’s fault. But the rider’s family was poor—his widow showed up with two kids and caused a huge scene. In the end, the company still paid compensation out of ‘humanitarian concern.’ And our driver? He couldn’t take it psychologically and never came back to work. Do you think our lives are easy? Driving Uber all day barely pays! They don’t care about their own lives—and they don’t care about ours either!”
I agreed that this kind of driving was frightening, but added, carefully, that many riders take risks because platform algorithms and delivery rules leave them little choice.
“Why are you taking their side?” the driver snapped, his irritation escalating into disbelief. In that moment, within the tight space of the car, it felt as if I—as a passenger—was expected to show loyalty to him simply by virtue of sharing the ride.
Many things have become more expensive, and this is fertile ground for irritation. When people’s everyday time and space—and the platforms through which they sustain the lives they want—are all being compressed, empathy itself becomes costly. So do communication, patience, and sometimes social trust. If social structures generate something like a collective mood, then irritation occupies a large portion of Shanghai’s post-pandemic everyday atmosphere.
Shanghai is, in many ways, a surprisingly orderly city given its size—but maintaining that order demands enormous human effort. Each space functions through multiple layers of explicit and implicit rules. When an all-day ride-hailing driver and a delivery rider who cannot earn a living without breaking traffic laws collide—even briefly—the sharp flash of conflict is only a surface spark from a much deeper well of irritation.
The IRRITATION project gathers data combining qualitative and quantitative methods over a twelve-month period. These include structured experiments, diary-based approaches, and sustained observation across age groups and social contexts, which the intensive fieldwork period is all about. Designing research that holds time constant in some settings while allowing it to unfold naturally in others has been methodologically demanding, but also deeply generative.
My fieldwork in Shanghai has involved moving across a wide range of everyday settings. Over the course of roughly three months, I conducted observations at a local primary school three to four times a week. Outside of that, I circulated through diverse social scenes: joining group activities, accompanying interlocutors through their daily routines, and following them across multiple spaces.
At different times, this meant attending a weekend family meal spanning three generations; accompanying mothers to children’s sports training or after-school tutoring; sitting with patients during hospital visits; or traveling with interlocutors from Shanghai back to their hometowns and then returning again.
For me, this has also been the first time conducting fieldwork and research activities involving children alongside adults. Moving between these age groups sharpened my attention to how temporal pressure, uncertainty, and adult anxieties circulate through everyday life and are often concentrated within parent–child relationships. Rather than treating irritation as an isolated feeling, the research design approaches it as something embedded in routines, obligations, and relational expectations that stretch across generations.
In many cases, I followed the same individual across a full chain of everyday movement—from home to public transport, then onward to workplaces, hospitals, leisure venues, friends’ homes, or religious spaces—while watching them shift roles: from professional to adult child, from teacher to mother, from corporate manager to hobby-class participant.
Across these spaces and roles, people constantly negotiate the gap between how things should happen and how they actually unfold. This gap requires ongoing mental and emotional effort. Long-term relationships and busy daily routines quietly accumulate emotional weight.
“Who knows what things will be like in the future?” This is a phrase I heard repeatedly. China is experiencing its first major economic downturn since the Reform era (time period that started in late 1970s when the Chinese market started open up policy). Combined with the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and strained international relations, the effects are especially pronounced in Shanghai, a city deeply tied to global trade. During the pandemic, the 60-day quarantine completely changed the fabric of everyday lives in Shanghai, including both strengthening of the neighborhood and ruptures of social trusts.
Daily life has become increasingly expensive—not only financially, but cognitively and emotionally. Work, study, and everyday coordination all require sustained mental effort.
“Even rich people are time-poor and anxious about the future,” one interlocutor put it succinctly. “Everyone lives with the feeling that if you miss this chance, there won’t be another.” Space is increasingly purchased with money; time is relentlessly compressed.
Outside of a few secure public-sector jobs, two full days off per week are rare, and after-hours work communication is nearly universal. Shanghai offers forms of independence from kin-based support systems found in more traditional social structures, while simultaneously intensifying quantification, evaluation, and accountability. Many people expressed a persistent fear of being discarded or blamed by the system.
“Come back in two years,” another interlocutor told me, “And everything might feel completely different.”
For anthropologists, however, change is always both historical and ordinary. It appears in fleeting moments of irritation that last only minutes, as well as in the slower reconfiguration of social rhythms.
Within the IRRITATION project, attending to these everyday frictions—through ethnography, experiments, and collaborative methods—is one way of staying with the pulse of social life as it is lived, strained, and continuously recalibrated.