One of humanity’s great traditions is for older people to complain about the work ethic of younger people. We have seen this pattern repeat with every generation in modern history, and we would probably see something similar if we could go back to a time before modern history. It seems likely that if you talked to a 45-year-old in the year 1200 BC they would tell you that kids those days were a bunch of lazy, ungrateful whippersnappers. In fact, we don’t have to speculate about this, we know that Aristotle, some 300 years before Christ, complained that young people of the day were “high minded” and had not yet been “humbled by life.” Meanwhile, the Roman poet Horace in the first century BC chastised young people as “beardless” and accused them of squandering their money. Which tells us that the epidemic of beardless men goes all the way back to Ancient Rome. A shocking discovery.
The point is that there is nothing new under the sun, and complaints by old fogies, like myself, directed at the youth are certainly no exception to that rule. However, just because a complaint is common, that doesn’t make it necessarily invalid. In fact, if anything, it would seem to suggest the opposite. And these days, when it comes to concerns over a lack of work ethic among the current crop of young adults, all signs indicate that the concerns are well founded. I don’t know if they were true in Rome or Greece two thousand years ago, but I know that here, in the year 2023, we have a serious problem.
In 2021, Time magazine reported that young people are leaving their jobs in record numbers, and many of them are not getting new jobs at all. This trend does not seem to have slowed down. At the beginning of this year, CNBC reported that 70% of Gen Z and Millennials are planning to leave their jobs. Of course plenty of them will get new jobs, or try to, but the number of young adults who have no job, and are not in school, has been trending upwards. As of 2022, over half of Gen Z adults are living at home with their parents. The statistics are pretty familiar to most people. But the issue isn’t simply Gen Z refusing to get jobs, it’s how they behave once they have them.
A survey of 1,300 employers and managers revealed a significant consensus that this current group of young adults tend to be extremely difficult in the workplace.
The New York Post reports:
Some American business owners and managers hold a dismal view of Gen Z workers, shocking new research has revealed. ResumeBuilder surveyed 1,344 people in managerial positions across different industries in the US earlier this month, asking them about their experiences working with those born in 1997 or later. Almost half (49%) of respondents declared it difficult to work with Gen Z “all or most of the time,” while a staggering 79% said they find them the most difficult generation to have in the workplace. Of that majority, 59% said that they’ve had to fire a Gen Z employee and 20% even claimed to have axed one of the young workers within a week of their start date. Managers and owners commonly cited entitlement and a lack of effort, motivation and productivity as reasons why they were given the boot.
This brings to mind all of the Gen Z-led trends we’ve discussed on this show: “Quiet quitting,” and “bare minimum Mondays,” and even “resenteeism.” All just trendier and slightly more subtle ways of describing laziness. It’s not always subtle though. The quiet quitting trend was recently supplanted by “loud quitting,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
Here’s a video promoting this fun new fad:
Just to be clear, the good guy in that scenario is supposed to be the gratingly obnoxious and disrespectful employee. She is meant to be the sympathetic character in the exchange. Which perhaps tells you everything you need to know. Of course, the quiet quitters and loud quitters and bare minimum Mondayers have excuses for their lackadaisical approach.
As Business Insider reported a few weeks ago, Gen Z employees say their perceived laziness can be explained by the fact that they feel “unfulfilled” at work, or that they are “burned out,” or unhappy with their wages, or they are looking for a better “work/life balance,” or some combination of these excuses. But whether the excuses are valid or not — we’ll get to that in a moment — it seems that even many Gen Zers themselves will not deny their general lack of effort. It’s just that they think they have good reasons for it.
That brings us to this extremely viral video that, if you spend any time on social media, you’ve likely already seen. In the video, we hear a young woman giving her perspective on her first 9-to-5 job. She is, to put it mildly, not thrilled with it:
A ton of people dunking on this girl for being a “spoiled brat” but my take is that the vast majority of women aren’t built to thrive with this kind of work and shouldn’t be expected to pic.twitter.com/CdLcK367iX
— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) October 25, 2023
Now, as always with these viral videos, the story isn’t the video itself but the general reaction to it. And from what I’ve seen, although there are some people telling her to stop whining and get to work, a large percentage of people have taken her side and scolded those who are criticizing her. They say that she is entirely justified in being so upset about the 9-to-5 grind. That the work hours, the lifestyle, the commute, are indeed very difficult, if not completely soul-crushing.
According to this side of the discussion, those being unsympathetic to this young lady are needlessly cruel and heartless. Meanwhile plenty of young people have chimed in to echo her complaints. They are done with the 9-to-5 routine, they say. It’s time to abolish it for good.
Here’s what I say. A few points. First of all, I personally would not want to work a 9-to-5 corporate job. Even if it was a 9-to-noon corporate job, and my commute was 10 minutes, and I was paid a million dollars, I would find it unbearable. Nothing against the people who work those kinds of jobs. If that’s how you feed your family, more power to you. If you find a way to be fulfilled in it, even better. For me, personally, I think I’d rather be in a prison camp. So I understand anyone who sits in a cubicle all day and laments it, I would lament it too. But the thing that is often missing from the Gen Z lamentations about the modern working world is any discussion about the alternatives. As I so often preach, we all — well, most of us — have to work. Life is work. Work comes in many forms, but no matter what, if you are like the vast majority of humans who have lived on Earth, you will have to pick some form of it. Life requires work to sustain. There is no way around this, outside of enslaving others and forcing them to do all of that work for you. So if you don’t want to jump on the 9-to-5, here are your other options.
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One: If you’re a woman, you can become a stay-at-home mom. It is certainly not a coincidence that so many of these TikTok videos of people complaining about “hustle culture” and the daily corporate grind feature women. That’s because women are not wired for it the way that men are. That’s the reality whether we want to admit it or not. What many women actually desire — even if they feel they aren’t allowed to articulate the desire — is to be mothers and homemakers. The drive to leave the home and ruthlessly compete to earn a living is an inherently masculine drive. Lots of women simply not have that in them, and that is certainly not a bad thing. They aren’t lacking in something. They are just different. They are women. And women are not men. So if this push against the 9-to-5 grind leads more women to embrace their calling as wives and mothers, that’s a good thing.
But there is a caveat here. Being a stay-at-home mom is work. It’s not a job, but it is work. In fact, it requires a lot more work than the average 9-to-5 job. That’s partly because the work begins much earlier than 9:00am and goes much later than 5:00pm. As I said, life is work. Leaving the 9-to-5 behind does not mean leaving work behind. In many cases, it means more work, harder work, more exhausting work. Work with much more on the line and a lot more pressure. But the good news is that the work is more fulfilling and more important. But it is work all the same.
Two: A second option is, you can get a job outside of the 9-to-5 structure. The easiest version of this option would be a remote job. The only problem is that many companies are trending away from remote work. Also, if you choose to work from home, and you do care about climbing the ladder in your industry, you will likely be hindered by the lack of physical, in person interaction with your coworkers and bosses.
Or you could leave the corporate world behind entirely and become an entrepreneur or pursue a career in a creative industry. That’s what I decided to do, and I have never once regretted it. As I said, desks and cubicles and busy work have just never been my strong suit. If I had to work a corporate job, you may see me crying about it on TikTok too. But again, there is the caveat. This path will almost always require far, far more work. The 9-to-5 set up is irrelevant in my line of work, but that’s because I work a whole lot more than 8 hours-a-day. For me it’s more like 12 or 13 hours-a-day or more. In fact, in my business, you’re basically always on the clock. But I wouldn’t trade it for a corporate job under any circumstance. Which is probably a good thing because no corporation would touch me with a ten foot pole at this point.
Finally, number three: Drop out. If you’re done with capitalism and the modern working world entirely — as many Gen Zers claim to be — then the third option is your only real option. You can get away from it all, drop out of modern society to the extent that it’s possible to do such a thing, move out to the wilderness somewhere and try to live a self-sustaining life. Build your own home, grow your own food, hunt, and fish for survival. This is how nearly everyone lived before the invention of the 9-to-5. The way to reject that system entirely is to go back to a pre-industrial lifestyle, which is still technically possible. But this, out of all of the options, will be by far and away the hardest and require the most amount of work. That’s because people prior to the Industrial Age worked essentially every minute of every day, sun up to sun down, with no breaks on weekends and no federal holidays. I would greatly admire anyone who attempted to live this way today, but if you’re doing it because you want more free time, well you’re going to be in for a very unfortunate surprise.
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If you don’t want any of these options — you don’t want to be a stay-at-home mom, you don’t want to work in an industry outside of the 9-to-5 system, you don’t want to be a pioneer out in the woods — then the corporate slog is all you have left. That or winning the lottery. But you aren’t going to win the lottery, so the corporate slog it is. As you’ve probably noticed, that slog may be a slog, but it’s also the easiest and least arduous path, and requires the least amount of work, and gives you the most free time, out of all of the possibilities. It just won’t make you as fulfilled.
If you want more fulfillment, you have to do more work. If you want less work, you’ll get less fulfillment. This is the way life is set up and there is no way around it.
Is it fair? I guess not. Is it worth complaining about? Probably not. Can you change it by complaining? Definitely not. Either way, this is life. This is what it means to be a person. You have to work, one way or another. So make your decision, choose your path, and get going.