Young people don’t want to work any more. Everything is a sign that the modern world has betrayed us. “In short then, the washing-up bowl is another symptom of the UK’s dysfunctional housing market,” explained one writer in the New Statesman. Malaise has come to typify the millennial generation. Nihilism is the guiding philosophy. The only salvation is checking out of society altogether.
The idea that hard work is rewarded with economic prosperity has been turned on its head. The notion that the world can grow inexorably has been undermined. A series of movements – quiet quitting, the great resignation, digital nomadism – is seeing young workers retreat from office, reject the capitalist ethos of their parents, and refuse to climb the greasy poles of career success.
If we really are the anti-work generation then it is a rather flimsy revolution. Newspapers might want to lambaste this cohort as lazy and coddled. Or worse. As one Telegraph headline put it: “The TikTok generation’s anti-work movement is dangerous and unrealistic.”
Conversely, young people might want to bask in the romance of their alleged bohemianism.
Both sides have got it wrong: young people aren’t work-shy and they are certainly not bohemian.
Youth unemployment figures are at record lows in the United Kingdom and, according to Eurostat, Ireland’s figures are currently the lowest in Europe
The notion of quiet quitting – the phenomenon of doing just enough to be paid at work but not so little to be fired – has taken off on TikTok. The young workforce is apparently overstretched, burnt out, and is rejecting “grind” culture that demands employees go above and beyond. But what, exactly, is anti-work about retaining a job and showing up every day? Has every workplace not always been filled with those who are ambitious and those who take it easy?
Likewise the great resignation – the mass worker exodus over the pandemic – has been billed as the rebellion of the beleaguered labourer, ultimately dissatisfied with corporate culture and fed up with their treatment at the hands of greedy bosses. Not content with simply putting in fewer hours, they are leaving the workforce altogether.
But we should be even more sceptical of these sweeping generalisations than any of the shallow musings on quiet quitting. It is true that 2021 saw resignations in record numbers. Yes, some probably did quit because of an unshakeable ennui. But more, a glut of economists agree, did so in search of higher wages and better opportunities.
“The increase in quits is mostly about low-wage workers switching to better jobs in industries that are raising wages to grab new employees as fast as possible,” explained Derek Thompson in the Atlantic. This kind of job-hopping may be proof that company loyalty is no longer a shared value, but it is hardly proof of a generation unmotivated to work altogether.
Meanwhile, youth unemployment figures are at record lows in the United Kingdom and, according to Eurostat, Ireland’s figures are currently the lowest in Europe. In November last year, the Institute of Student Employers found that 2021 has seen the highest number of applications per graduate vacancy since they began collecting data in 1999.
Consider the case of the so-called digital nomads who eschew the confines of the office altogether. Aren’t they unassailable proof that young people are checking out of the rat race? This new category of worker has emerged thanks to cheap data-roaming plans and increasingly flexible office arrangements. They choose to travel, work from their smartphones and refuse to commit to a permanent home. They present themselves as untethered by the demands of normal life – a corporate graduate programme is akin to modern slavery in their eyes.
Perhaps the ‘young people don’t want to work’ mantra is just another stick for the older generations to beat the already browbeaten millennial
But sending emails from a cafe in Berlin, or taking a Zoom call from a beach in Bali is a pale imitation of a shackle-free existence. And it is anything but anti-corporate. If anything, the digital nomad proves you can be a capital generating, functional corporate cog from anywhere. Claims to bohemian lay-about status ring hollow. “When you’re a digital nomad, the whole world is your office,” the New York Times explained.
The reality is that the demands of modernity may have simply killed the bohemian. And the advent of digital connectivity has sounded the death knell of the aimless vagabonds.
The younger generation of workers have come of age in an education landscape specifically designed to prepare us for corporate life. Malcolm Harris explains in Kids These Days that “when students are working, what they’re working on is their ability to work”. Childhood, he adds, “is the time to accumulate the skills and abilities necessary to compete in a tough adult job market, an arms race that pits kids and their families against each other in an ever-escalating battle for a competitive edge”. This anxious quest for personal optimisation is hardly conducive to producing drifters content with both a lack of ambition and a life of financial precarity.
Perhaps the “young people don’t want to work” mantra is just another stick for the older generations to beat the already browbeaten millennial. Maybe, as the world changes radically, we are desperately grasping for new phenomena – real or otherwise – to explain it back to us.
Young people may be anxious, nihilists, pessimistic about the lot they’ve been handed in life – fairly or unfairly, self-pitying or not. But young people aren’t working? I just don’t buy it.