> Young people saying ‘I don’t want to do work like this’ does not mean young people don’t want to work anymore.
I think, if folks are honest, you'd find a lot of older folks don't want to work *like this* anymore, either. I'm a GenXer, and I for sure don't, and almost everyone else I know is fed up with the status quo, too-and even more fed up with entrenched Boomers (and fellow GenXers who act more like Boomers) who've ingested so much kool-aid over the years that they refuse to budge even when it's in their best interest. Work needs to change, and I'm really glad the younger folks are saying it out loud.
I'm on the tail end of Gen X and have been a freelancer for 20 years because I just cannot and do not fit in the full time 8-6:30pm world. The 3 times I've tried always ends in devastating mental health collapses, wiped out from stress and toxic abusive work places.
I remember trying to convince a boss I had a contract with a decade ago to let me work permanently part-time but he was aghast. Basically said to my face that I was a lazy no-good-for-nothing, and especially because 'how dare I if I didn't even have children?' I said it's because I have a life and I want to keep it with all the other important things in it that are not 40hrs a week of damn work! He was horrified and soon hired a junior to replace me on a tiny fraction of my pay of course.
I've never agreed with this system and never will. It's even more horrific now (compared to the last 50+ years) because none of us are getting paid enough to even survive compared with cushy damn boomers / some older Gen Xers - student debts, insane rents, cost of living crisis - it's a lose/lose world now, so no, it's not toughen up - it's break down and rage about it time! Enough is enough!
I find GenX varies a LOT, and not just by age. My younger brother is more Boomerish than I am, by a lot. But there certainly are plenty of Xers who are feeling all these frustrations.
I love love love this! It was definitely a mini crisis I went through when I first started corporate world, then turned into PPD episodes with my first baby on how much I was missing with her. Why we don't have a 4 day work week, I have no idea.
I recalled how I told myself it's time to rearrange my life priorities when our first child was born 3 years ago. It took something so fundamental in life - a new born baby - to wake us up from this modern world that seems to put efficiency and bottom-line first. After all, I know I want to be there for my kids when they need me. Why we don't have 4 days work week yet, I have no idea either. I tried not to set any meeting on Friday though:)
I'm an American who has been living in Italy for 20 years now. Wage are low here, but nobody reached adulthood with a bunch of older adults telling them to 'suck it up' and if you want something you better work hard. The idea that life can only be enjoyed IF you suffering enough is such a weird Anglo-American protestant ideal that we seem to think this is the reality all over the world. It's not. Living to work is not healthy. It leads to premature death and also realizing that in most jobs, if you died today you'd be replacement in a week makes me think that it's not worth it. So sick of Boomers pushing this idiotic lifestyle on us when they were handed everything. They didn't reach adulthood in severe debt just to be educated so they could find a shitty job. One person in a family could work 40 hrs a week, buy and house and support a family and have holidays and cars. That's not possible now, no matter how hard you work, so why work for nothing? I'd rather work as a cocktail waitress and make tips than do any kind of 9 to 5 office job.
Lucky thing you can choose any job you want to do.
I do resent your comment that "boomers ... we're handed everything ".
I for one never had anything handed to me. I've worked to earn money so I could have what I want since I was 12 years old. I don't know many people my age who didn't work for their living. I also went to nursing school and had student loans, but I chose a technical college that cost less than the universities. Again choice.
I managed to switch to 4 day work weeks the last few years before retired. I did love that.
In the country people are free to work as much or as little as they want.
If it doesn't apply...scroll on by. Resenting something that applies to the majority of white boomers. If that's notbthe case for you, great but there are thousands of studies showing how boomers have been pretty much the luckiest and must selfish generation in American history. There are books. Maybe read them instead of getting offended about nothing.
We have been culturized to believe that we must work more and be more productive to be better members of society, even if that work is so time consuming that we have no time to participate in society. I know plenty of professionals from all generations that have decided to do a great job during their expected work hours who end their day on time and do not work once the work day ends. I am one of them. Work is work. My colleagues are not my family. I like my job and I like leaving it at the end of the day so that I can enjoy my family and my community. Kudos to this young woman who is disturbed by the work culture she finds herself in. Hopefully she can push back and set boundaries so that she has some time for the people and activities in her life.
I worked 3 days a week at a factory (actually a private school but they churned out kids on an assembly line) with an hour commute each way.
I was 'offered' a full -time (6 days a week) post due to 'the needs of the business ' meaning part-time was no longer viable.
This was a difficult decision: it was time versus money.
I chose the time because of my young family: we would have had to move house and my daughter had just started at a good school.
11 years later and I have earned a pittance since being self-employed .I have spent more time with my family: not all of it 'quality'. Most of it is helping with the logistics.
My health is better than my peers who moan about their 11 hour days.
But they go out to eat at the weekends and drive newer cars than me.
I never noticed how all consuming work was until I suddenly (and unplanned) retired. The young lady is correct. Even worse, once they are done with you they don’t care about you at all.
Black would probably work? I don't have too much of a problem reading this and I like the different flavor. But it got proven somewhere/somesite that white text is in fact harder to read (context was people thinking dark mode is automatically easier on the eyes)
Tell me again how my life has no joy. What a laugh. Believing in principles, committing to a life plan and executing led to a very comfortable life, great family and friends, free time to pursue anything I wish and the means to do it. And I started with nothing but a willingness to better myself. Did it involve delayed gratification? Yes. Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. My point is not that you have to give your life over to work; rather, it is to choose your path and pursue it. But don’t assume that your choices will lead to better things or that my choices don’t. If what you’re doing works for you, great. If not find another route.
It’s really quite simple. If you want something better in your life, you have to work for it. Whether it be be more time for yourself or more money, you must find a way to make it happen. Wishing and hoping doesn’t cut it. And just because you’ve always been provided for, it doesn’t give the right to get your way. Suck it up. If you don’t like your job and it’s commitments, it’s up to you to find another way. Just don’t expect to have all the trappings and comfort that others may have—you know those people who work for it.
Well, that didn’t take long. The article isn’t a critique of working hard, it’s pointing out that today’s work environment pushes everything else to the margins. What are we working for if we don’t have time for a day with the kids, a beer with friends, or a walk in the woods? I’m in my late 50s and I get three weeks of vacation every year (US citizen). To say I’m not “working hard” misses the point that I just value my time more than my employer. There’s no harm in fighting for a more balanced approach.
I work like 10 hours a week and have holidays, a home, access to medical care etc. Because I don't live in American where we expect people to identify as their job. We qre replaceable. Live for you not for the CEO.
Very nice article. I resent work (that for me has been being a project manager), whilst my “job and purpose” has always been writing. I don't feel writing is a task, a chore, or work. It's something I HAVE to do, like eating or breathing or washing or drinking or sneezing.
The unfortunate circumstance is that writing is not my means of sustenance (yet? Ever?) so I have to suck it up and perform work for money, and with time I am losing interest in the tasks of the job, resenting every hour I spend in it and admittedly becoming less and less effective because the only thing I care is writing, and well of course being able to pay my bills, which comes at a price: time.
I find more and more that everything in the workplace, for anyone except those lucky few who genuinely love their jobs, is just performance art. Bad enough you have to have the job rather than being able to do the things you love, but having to fake your way through every day so they think you’re the model employee on top of it is both cruel and exhausting. i think this is why so many of us are so much happer working from home. At least there, we can just do the work and skip the act.
The performance act! How could I forget that. “I’m busy busy” act 1, “can we meet quickly to discuss” as act 2, and “a roundtable meeting” as last act!
I love your essay about work. Maybe medicine is a little bit different. I worked for thirty-four years as a neonatologist, striving to save the lives of premature and ill newborn infants in the NICU. It was wonderful work, but oh, so difficult. In my forties, when I was working full-time, usually sixty hours a week, also raising three children, I asked my psychiatrist why this was so hard, and he answered, “they call it work, and they pay you to do it.” I have told many whinging younger people this notion when they complain, but it does not seem to help. At age sixty, one younger partner, then in his late thirties, told me he was leaving the practice because we “worked too much.” At that time. we had finally made it to a fifty hour per week schedule which felt comfortable and fulfilling. We shared our weekend coverage and night call fairly, but he thought it was all too much. He wanted more out of life. I questioned, to myself, why he had gone to medical school, since I rarely enjoyed a less than fifty hour work week until then. I loved ICU medicine, since it was immediately rewarding and often satisfying. I was very good at my job. My only regret is the inhumane training hours, and the wickedly stressful situations and schedules one endures to learn their craft. I am a boomer. My dharma was being a neonatologist and loving my work.
I am 78, have SS, a good wife on SS tiny pension and still need extra income
I am lucky though I have a job 2 days/ week 4 hrs each driving cars at an auto auction. I can do it even with a handicap.
So there are Boomers and then boomers, you can sorta tell by their advice.
I agree with the middle way, do what you can, do what you must, pick your battles well, find your passion and do some slow breathing exercises. Be well.
Point taken. However, is it not equally condescending to maintain that anyone who chooses work and commits to it as being miserable, misses out on all the good things in life or is a slave to the CEO. There are many opportunities in the system. If your current situation isn’t working, find another and accept your results may be different.
It would be really helpful if you’d learn to use the reply function so people can actually follow what you’re trying to say.
And no, I don’t think people expressing their own experience of the workplace is condescending. I think it’s just different from yours, and you continue to express yourself in a way that deeply implies that your way is the only “right” way (“accept that your results may be different,” for instance, implies that everyone wants the same results in the first place, which is just not true). Your words make it very hard to believe that you’re trying to say otherwise.
Your way is not the only way—not by any stretch—and there are not always “many opportunities in the system,” especially if you’re not a straight white guy, so I’ll be moving on now.
Actually that’s my point. We’re each individually responsible to find that way. There are many different ways to find fulfillment. I wish you well in pursuing it in your life.
If that’s really your point, you might want to find a less condescending way to make it, because it’s obscuring what you’re trying to say. Look at the last three sentences of your first comment for an example. You very much come across as lecturing everyone else about the “right” way to do things--yours.
I'm a geriatric millennial and the first 3 months of my post uni full time office work left me feeling exactly like that. "People live like this?? What's even the point?" I spent years struggling with this. Tried different jobs (but office job is ultimately an office job), living frugally to save money and then taking time off for 10 months or so to live off my savings. It wasn't until the pandemic hit and working from home changed my life. It turns out it wasn't the job I hated. It was this rut, and the commute, and just the draining atmosphere of open space offices where i felt I was being watched all the time.
> Young people saying ‘I don’t want to do work like this’ does not mean young people don’t want to work anymore.
I think, if folks are honest, you'd find a lot of older folks don't want to work *like this* anymore, either. I'm a GenXer, and I for sure don't, and almost everyone else I know is fed up with the status quo, too-and even more fed up with entrenched Boomers (and fellow GenXers who act more like Boomers) who've ingested so much kool-aid over the years that they refuse to budge even when it's in their best interest. Work needs to change, and I'm really glad the younger folks are saying it out loud.
I'm on the tail end of Gen X and have been a freelancer for 20 years because I just cannot and do not fit in the full time 8-6:30pm world. The 3 times I've tried always ends in devastating mental health collapses, wiped out from stress and toxic abusive work places.
I remember trying to convince a boss I had a contract with a decade ago to let me work permanently part-time but he was aghast. Basically said to my face that I was a lazy no-good-for-nothing, and especially because 'how dare I if I didn't even have children?' I said it's because I have a life and I want to keep it with all the other important things in it that are not 40hrs a week of damn work! He was horrified and soon hired a junior to replace me on a tiny fraction of my pay of course.
I've never agreed with this system and never will. It's even more horrific now (compared to the last 50+ years) because none of us are getting paid enough to even survive compared with cushy damn boomers / some older Gen Xers - student debts, insane rents, cost of living crisis - it's a lose/lose world now, so no, it's not toughen up - it's break down and rage about it time! Enough is enough!
‘It’s break down and rage about it time’ - YES you are so right!!
Then when we also realise we get paid less than men for such a privilege of having no life... the rage is personified!
I'm definitely here for the raging.
Awesome! Then when we also realise we get paid less than men for such a privilege of having no life... oh yes the rage.
I find GenX varies a LOT, and not just by age. My younger brother is more Boomerish than I am, by a lot. But there certainly are plenty of Xers who are feeling all these frustrations.
True dat!
I love love love this! It was definitely a mini crisis I went through when I first started corporate world, then turned into PPD episodes with my first baby on how much I was missing with her. Why we don't have a 4 day work week, I have no idea.
I recalled how I told myself it's time to rearrange my life priorities when our first child was born 3 years ago. It took something so fundamental in life - a new born baby - to wake us up from this modern world that seems to put efficiency and bottom-line first. After all, I know I want to be there for my kids when they need me. Why we don't have 4 days work week yet, I have no idea either. I tried not to set any meeting on Friday though:)
I try the Friday trick too, unsuccessfully 🙃
Hum... try Thursday maybe ;)
I'm an American who has been living in Italy for 20 years now. Wage are low here, but nobody reached adulthood with a bunch of older adults telling them to 'suck it up' and if you want something you better work hard. The idea that life can only be enjoyed IF you suffering enough is such a weird Anglo-American protestant ideal that we seem to think this is the reality all over the world. It's not. Living to work is not healthy. It leads to premature death and also realizing that in most jobs, if you died today you'd be replacement in a week makes me think that it's not worth it. So sick of Boomers pushing this idiotic lifestyle on us when they were handed everything. They didn't reach adulthood in severe debt just to be educated so they could find a shitty job. One person in a family could work 40 hrs a week, buy and house and support a family and have holidays and cars. That's not possible now, no matter how hard you work, so why work for nothing? I'd rather work as a cocktail waitress and make tips than do any kind of 9 to 5 office job.
Lucky thing you can choose any job you want to do.
I do resent your comment that "boomers ... we're handed everything ".
I for one never had anything handed to me. I've worked to earn money so I could have what I want since I was 12 years old. I don't know many people my age who didn't work for their living. I also went to nursing school and had student loans, but I chose a technical college that cost less than the universities. Again choice.
I managed to switch to 4 day work weeks the last few years before retired. I did love that.
In the country people are free to work as much or as little as they want.
If it doesn't apply...scroll on by. Resenting something that applies to the majority of white boomers. If that's notbthe case for you, great but there are thousands of studies showing how boomers have been pretty much the luckiest and must selfish generation in American history. There are books. Maybe read them instead of getting offended about nothing.
We have been culturized to believe that we must work more and be more productive to be better members of society, even if that work is so time consuming that we have no time to participate in society. I know plenty of professionals from all generations that have decided to do a great job during their expected work hours who end their day on time and do not work once the work day ends. I am one of them. Work is work. My colleagues are not my family. I like my job and I like leaving it at the end of the day so that I can enjoy my family and my community. Kudos to this young woman who is disturbed by the work culture she finds herself in. Hopefully she can push back and set boundaries so that she has some time for the people and activities in her life.
I worked 3 days a week at a factory (actually a private school but they churned out kids on an assembly line) with an hour commute each way.
I was 'offered' a full -time (6 days a week) post due to 'the needs of the business ' meaning part-time was no longer viable.
This was a difficult decision: it was time versus money.
I chose the time because of my young family: we would have had to move house and my daughter had just started at a good school.
11 years later and I have earned a pittance since being self-employed .I have spent more time with my family: not all of it 'quality'. Most of it is helping with the logistics.
My health is better than my peers who moan about their 11 hour days.
But they go out to eat at the weekends and drive newer cars than me.
(I'm 54).
I never noticed how all consuming work was until I suddenly (and unplanned) retired. The young lady is correct. Even worse, once they are done with you they don’t care about you at all.
I dont wanna admit it but It is always been that way!
Please hire a graphic designer. The color combination of lavender with white text for this article makes it nearly unreadable.
I love that you think I could hire a graphic designer! But note very much taken, will take another look at font colour :)
Black would probably work? I don't have too much of a problem reading this and I like the different flavor. But it got proven somewhere/somesite that white text is in fact harder to read (context was people thinking dark mode is automatically easier on the eyes)
I will review your color selections for free!
The lavender would be better as an accent color for your buttons, etc., with a white background. Simple change, and much more readable.
100%, it's horrendous!!
Sorry sorry, have learned my lesson!
Tell me again how my life has no joy. What a laugh. Believing in principles, committing to a life plan and executing led to a very comfortable life, great family and friends, free time to pursue anything I wish and the means to do it. And I started with nothing but a willingness to better myself. Did it involve delayed gratification? Yes. Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. My point is not that you have to give your life over to work; rather, it is to choose your path and pursue it. But don’t assume that your choices will lead to better things or that my choices don’t. If what you’re doing works for you, great. If not find another route.
You're way isn't the only way to have a deeply satisfying life.
It’s really quite simple. If you want something better in your life, you have to work for it. Whether it be be more time for yourself or more money, you must find a way to make it happen. Wishing and hoping doesn’t cut it. And just because you’ve always been provided for, it doesn’t give the right to get your way. Suck it up. If you don’t like your job and it’s commitments, it’s up to you to find another way. Just don’t expect to have all the trappings and comfort that others may have—you know those people who work for it.
Well, that didn’t take long. The article isn’t a critique of working hard, it’s pointing out that today’s work environment pushes everything else to the margins. What are we working for if we don’t have time for a day with the kids, a beer with friends, or a walk in the woods? I’m in my late 50s and I get three weeks of vacation every year (US citizen). To say I’m not “working hard” misses the point that I just value my time more than my employer. There’s no harm in fighting for a more balanced approach.
I work like 10 hours a week and have holidays, a home, access to medical care etc. Because I don't live in American where we expect people to identify as their job. We qre replaceable. Live for you not for the CEO.
That's such bullshit. Just because your life has no joy doesn't mean the rest of us should live that way.
Very nice article. I resent work (that for me has been being a project manager), whilst my “job and purpose” has always been writing. I don't feel writing is a task, a chore, or work. It's something I HAVE to do, like eating or breathing or washing or drinking or sneezing.
The unfortunate circumstance is that writing is not my means of sustenance (yet? Ever?) so I have to suck it up and perform work for money, and with time I am losing interest in the tasks of the job, resenting every hour I spend in it and admittedly becoming less and less effective because the only thing I care is writing, and well of course being able to pay my bills, which comes at a price: time.
I find more and more that everything in the workplace, for anyone except those lucky few who genuinely love their jobs, is just performance art. Bad enough you have to have the job rather than being able to do the things you love, but having to fake your way through every day so they think you’re the model employee on top of it is both cruel and exhausting. i think this is why so many of us are so much happer working from home. At least there, we can just do the work and skip the act.
The performance act! How could I forget that. “I’m busy busy” act 1, “can we meet quickly to discuss” as act 2, and “a roundtable meeting” as last act!
Yep. It's the same old hamster wheel, just dressed up to look "professional."
I love your essay about work. Maybe medicine is a little bit different. I worked for thirty-four years as a neonatologist, striving to save the lives of premature and ill newborn infants in the NICU. It was wonderful work, but oh, so difficult. In my forties, when I was working full-time, usually sixty hours a week, also raising three children, I asked my psychiatrist why this was so hard, and he answered, “they call it work, and they pay you to do it.” I have told many whinging younger people this notion when they complain, but it does not seem to help. At age sixty, one younger partner, then in his late thirties, told me he was leaving the practice because we “worked too much.” At that time. we had finally made it to a fifty hour per week schedule which felt comfortable and fulfilling. We shared our weekend coverage and night call fairly, but he thought it was all too much. He wanted more out of life. I questioned, to myself, why he had gone to medical school, since I rarely enjoyed a less than fifty hour work week until then. I loved ICU medicine, since it was immediately rewarding and often satisfying. I was very good at my job. My only regret is the inhumane training hours, and the wickedly stressful situations and schedules one endures to learn their craft. I am a boomer. My dharma was being a neonatologist and loving my work.
Wow, a diet of cake and nails today.
I am 78, have SS, a good wife on SS tiny pension and still need extra income
I am lucky though I have a job 2 days/ week 4 hrs each driving cars at an auto auction. I can do it even with a handicap.
So there are Boomers and then boomers, you can sorta tell by their advice.
I agree with the middle way, do what you can, do what you must, pick your battles well, find your passion and do some slow breathing exercises. Be well.
Point taken. However, is it not equally condescending to maintain that anyone who chooses work and commits to it as being miserable, misses out on all the good things in life or is a slave to the CEO. There are many opportunities in the system. If your current situation isn’t working, find another and accept your results may be different.
It would be really helpful if you’d learn to use the reply function so people can actually follow what you’re trying to say.
And no, I don’t think people expressing their own experience of the workplace is condescending. I think it’s just different from yours, and you continue to express yourself in a way that deeply implies that your way is the only “right” way (“accept that your results may be different,” for instance, implies that everyone wants the same results in the first place, which is just not true). Your words make it very hard to believe that you’re trying to say otherwise.
Your way is not the only way—not by any stretch—and there are not always “many opportunities in the system,” especially if you’re not a straight white guy, so I’ll be moving on now.
Actually that’s my point. We’re each individually responsible to find that way. There are many different ways to find fulfillment. I wish you well in pursuing it in your life.
If that’s really your point, you might want to find a less condescending way to make it, because it’s obscuring what you’re trying to say. Look at the last three sentences of your first comment for an example. You very much come across as lecturing everyone else about the “right” way to do things--yours.
I'm a geriatric millennial and the first 3 months of my post uni full time office work left me feeling exactly like that. "People live like this?? What's even the point?" I spent years struggling with this. Tried different jobs (but office job is ultimately an office job), living frugally to save money and then taking time off for 10 months or so to live off my savings. It wasn't until the pandemic hit and working from home changed my life. It turns out it wasn't the job I hated. It was this rut, and the commute, and just the draining atmosphere of open space offices where i felt I was being watched all the time.