Imagine, for a moment, the state of a teenager in 2020: slouched, still in pajamas at 3 p.m., eyes glazed over from blue light and boredom after spending seven hours in farcically unenlightening online classes. The zombified student then receives a phone call or, worse, an email polling their feelings about eventually entering the workforce. Do you envision an enthusiastic response? For me, this isn’t a thought experiment. Even though I was never polled, I was that kid.
A specific dataset surveying high school seniors between 2020 and 2022 is the basis for a number of claims made in a recent guest essay published by The New York Times titled “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them.” Writer Emi Nietfeld cites statistics that show a sharp decline in both the desire of eighteen-year-olds to work and their expectation that a job will be a meaningful part of their life. The essay, through no ill-intent, paints my generation as ineffectual, or at least unwilling, participants in the modern workforce, shunning corporate structures for grassroots operations and fickle digital income. In its most out of touch moment, the essay suggests that the majority of Gen Zers aspire to be influencers or online entrepreneurs.
More widely, our generational apathy is attributed to the unfortunate state of the economy. Phrases like “worst job market in years,” “cost of living crisis,” and, simply, “artificial intelligence,” are all too familiar to my agemates. These are genuine hurdles. But when people conflate them with Gen Z’s presumed lack of readiness and general self-absorption, they end up drawing the same conclusion: that my generation is uniquely incapable of contributing meaningfully to our local communities and the global economy.
Of course, this is proven by the numbers! The data! The trends! Well, not quite. Yes, the statistics do carry some weight. But they do not mean that Gen Z doesn’t want to work.
Members of Gen Z are now between fourteen and twenty-nine years old. Many of the assertions in the essay are directed at the younger half of that group (aged fourteen to twenty-two), from which the damning data is drawn. I am a part of that doomed faction. And the numbers do seem alarming—until you consider what the world looked like between 2020 and 2022. Other than a personal anecdote, Nietfeld makes no reference to Covid. She also fails to mention the number of hours my generation was forced to spend on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or the like. When I entered high school in 2020, these apps defined my education. All of those surveyed would have taken high-school classes remotely, at least in some capacity. The first online classes and assignments were poorly organized and grossly mismanaged. Remote schooling provided a brand-new hotbed for the teenage urge to slack off. During a crucial stage of our adolescent development, in which we wanted nothing more than to be in communion with one another, the world’s understanding of collective activity—from the schoolroom to the office—was inverted.
Seriously, who among us felt truly ambitious or hopeful at that time? As a freshman taking Latin in 2020, I personally felt no desire to carpe such a baleful diem. Four years on, I expect the professional drive among high-school seniors might be starting to rebound. And if it hasn’t yet, Gen Z’s work ethic isn’t to blame.
The fact is that most corporate businesses have eviscerated the possibility of fully in-person work. For the first time in decades, more office space is being removed than added, and last year office vacancies soared to a record high. These decisions are made by high-level executives and financial advisors looking to maximize profit, not by the still-eager young people entering the workforce.
In our adolescence, when people are typically most social, we spent our time instead in the developmental doldrums, completing remote tasks alone and attending stultifying meetings online. Any sensible member of Gen Z knows that this is not a healthy way to live. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that we are the least likely generation to favor fully remote work. So don’t blame us. Blame the executives at the top of the corporate ladder who have decided to prolong this digital purgatory, further disincentivizing the next generation of workers from becoming part of the Brave New working World. On top of this, companies have been reluctant to hire college grads without professional experience to work remotely, and even the young people who are hired aren’t receiving the in-person feedback or building the relationships they need to advance their careers. Employers are not making an effort to connect with new employees, almost all of whom have had their first taste of working culture through an AI application review. It’s not that “identifying with your work is no longer the vibe,” it’s that the new 9–5 workday—consisting of endless Zoom meetings, constant Slack messages, and little to no in-person interaction—is not the vibe.
Even in the face of ubiquitous digital “optimization” and borderless “automatization” Gen Z does not lack work ethic. The state of contemporary work itself just looks bleak. A significant part of my generation yearns for the 90’s and early 2000’s (just look at the analog resurgences from magazines to vinyl to fiction). We would happily suit up, go into the office, and toil away with the hopes of professional ascendency, if we were just given the chance.
Gen Z has ambition, as Nietfeld concedes in her essay. What she mistakes is its direction. On the whole, our ambition isn’t to build a social-media following or start an online business. My generation is already sick of influencer culture, and more than half of Gen Z is making intentional efforts to disconnect digitally.
If some members of Gen Z have fallen out of love with work, that’s on them. Most of us haven’t. Far from it—we’re concerned that work has fallen out of love with us without taking the trouble to find out who we are and what we can offer. What Gen Z really wants, because some of us are old enough to remember the last of its dying days, is to restore a version of the predigital workplace.
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