"Shut down and restart": immersion in rebirth micro-dramas and narrative career disruption among Chinese university students-an interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Rebirth micro-dramas have become a popular form of short-form entertainment in China. In these stories, a protagonist dies or is betrayed, returns to an earlier life stage with memories of the future, avoids previous mistakes, and quickly achieves success. For university students approaching graduation, this narrative may be especially attractive because it offers what real career development cannot: certainty, reversibility, and foreknowledge. Real career choices are slow, uncertain, and irreversible, and students must continue investing effort without knowing whether their decisions will lead to success. This study used interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine how 18 graduating undergraduate and final-year master's students in China understood rebirth or comeback-themed micro-dramas in relation to their own career difficulties and sense of meaning in life. All participants reported frequent exposure to such dramas and current career-related distress. Semi-structured interviews were conducted. The Self-Rating Idea of Suicide Scale, the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire, and the Meaning in Life Questionnaire were used only for purposive screening, case-level contextualization, and interpretative triangulation, not for diagnosis, statistical comparison, hypothesis testing, or causal inference. Three superordinate themes were identified. First, participants described a disenchanted comeback script, in which fictional certainty and rapid success made their own career development feel delayed, uncertain, and wrongly plotted. Second, some participants reported a perceived erosion of resilience, because ordinary effort seemed weak when compared with fictional success based on foreknowledge, hidden advantage, or instant reversal. Third, for several participants in higher-risk contextual profiles, reboot fantasies became entangled with meaning loss, emotional escape, and death-related metaphors. These accounts are interpreted as expressions of existential distress rather than evidence that micro-drama viewing directly produced clinical risk. Based on these findings, we propose narrative career disruption to describe how rebirth narratives may complicate vulnerable students' attempts to build realistic, agentic, and temporally continuous career stories. The study contributes to vocational psychology, cyberpsychology, and positive organizational behavior by showing how digital success narratives may shape young adults' interpretations of effort, failure, resilience, and life meaning during the school-to-work transition.