In the early 2010s, I worked at a McDonald’s in Birmingham. For £3.76 an hour I’d scrub the toilets, throw endless amounts of rubbish in the bin and stand at the drive-thru window handing out orders in all weathers. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the most rewarding job. But with the ink barely dry on my GCSE results, it taught me patience, humility and that, sometimes, even if the ice cream machine is working, I won’t serve you ice cream.
Since then, I’ve never stopped earning. But what has changed is the intensity of the jobs. Swapping sweating over a hot grill for mid-morning walks and early finishes, long gone are the days of me bending over backwards for a job.
So you can imagine my reaction when Jodie Foster recently called Gen Z ‘really annoying, especially in thenworkplace’, claiming they will, for example, come in late if they’re ‘not feeling it’. Foster’s attitude is everything that’s wrong with how Boomers, Gen X and Millennials characterise Gen Zers. We’re not lazy or demanding, we just work smarter.
The #Girlboss erathat Millennials and the likes of Emily Weiss and Sophia Amoruso championed in the mid 2010s is history: we’re not breaking our backs any more just to achieve the bare minimum or a bit of recognition. The culture previous generations built, whereby we must hustle through life, struggling and eventually getting burnt out, doesn’t work for us. Why? Because we’ve seen the results firsthand from our parents and co-workers who’ve become disillusioned with work culture.
You can see how it’s happened. Millennials grew up on the likes of Sex And The City, Ugly Betty and Legally Blonde – all stories that champion high-flying females. Overworked-but-sexy was the running theme. Two decades on, Gen Z is engrossed by shows such as Euphoria, Baddies and Sex Education, which prioritise real-life drama and societal issues. Our lives don’t revolve around gagging for the next promotion; the focus is about bettering ourselves and living life to the fullest – whether we have £10 or £10,000.
Call it ‘lazy girl’, ‘quiet quitting’, ‘anti-hustle culture’ or any of the other trending hashtags, but young people are no longer looking to traditional ways to make money. Besides, according to research from EY, 40% of Gen Z has a side hustle precisely because their salary isn’t enough to live off. As kids who grew up in the social media age, we’re having to turn to influencing, drop-shipping, store fronts and content creation – easy ways to supplement our salaries, all without even leaving the comfort of our bed. Commuting an hour to work to sit at a desk for eight hours, making money for someone else, just to be paid 12 times a year isn’t what Gen Z signed up for – and Gen Alpha is riding this wave with us.
But don’t underestimate our work ethic or entrepreneurship. Becoming self-employed means negotiating rates, legalities and taxes – all things we must learn ourselves, often while working a full-time job. We have to work smarter to survive this while protecting our mental health, so we look for jobs that give us the flexibility to not only live our lives, but also fund our dreams and prospects.
So to the older generations out there, I get it – you grew up in a workaholic society and you can’t quite break the shackles. But that doesn’t give you the right to shame Gen Z for our attitude towards office culture. We don’t have the work ethic problem, you do.