摸鱼

What does 摸鱼 mean?

摸鱼 originally meant groping for fish in murky water, from the idiom 浑水摸鱼. On the Chinese internet it now describes stealing time from your employer: browsing forums behind a spreadsheet, replying slowly in meetings, running a script that keeps your status green. The joke has a class dimension. After the 996 schedule debate and the rise of 打工人 humor in 2020, fishing at work became a small, widely shared form of quiet resistance, and 带薪摸鱼, paid fishing, is its proudest slogan. It is less bitter than 社畜, where a worker is owned by the company; a fisherman just borrows the hours back.

Where does 摸鱼 come from?

The idiom 浑水摸鱼, to fish in muddy water, means profiting from chaos and dates back centuries. Netizens later gave 摸鱼 the looser sense of goofing off, and by the mid-2010s office workers were already joking about fishing during work hours in forums and on Weibo. The word went fully mainstream alongside the anti-996 debate and the 打工人 memes of 2020, when remote work blurred the line between on and off duty. Today it titles everything from mouse-jiggler gadgets to playlists pretending to be productivity tools.

How to use 摸鱼

• 老板出差那天，整个办公室都在带薪摸鱼。
  Lǎobǎn chūchāi nà tiān, zhěnggè bàngōngshì dōu zài dàixīn mōyú.
  The day the boss left on a business trip, the entire office slacked off on company time.
• 他摸鱼摸出了新高度，写了个脚本让鼠标每五分钟自己动一下。
  Tā mōyú mō chū le xīn gāodù, xiě le gè jiǎoběn ràng shǔbiāo měi wǔ fēnzhōng zìjǐ dòng yīxià.
  He took slacking to a new level: he wrote a script that jiggles his mouse every five minutes.