Opinion: Gen Z is right to reject the false gospel of productivity
cnn.com"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote.
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
The ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious
Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further
House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries.
Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life.
In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices.
Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself.
On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment.
And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership
We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm
I agree and it actually gets worse…
The other alternative to gentrifying a neighborhood is moving to a LCOL city and watching prices rise there. So now Americans want to keep other Americans out of their cities.
And on top of that we are so car dependent that we can’t hope to build the kind of infill housing we need because there is literally not enough road capacity and transit options == lol.
Too bad the US has some of the worst transit construction costs in the world and tons of local opposition to boot.
If I was a betting person I would bet against the US figuring this out and guess that renting for your life will increasingly become the norm even in previously LCOL cities.
What does LCOL stand for?
Low cost of living.
Why should house prices in USA be any different than any other country? Adjusting for the current different real estate prices are much more in many other major cities around the world than that of in USA.
"Others have it worse" isn't a compelling argument for maintaining a status quo that isn't working for most people.
I agree. For all the bellyaching about US real estate prices (and I realize they have gone up a lot) it still one of the more affordable countries for a local resident to buy their own home.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/gmaps_rankings.js...
Is that including property tax and the fact that there is severely inadequate public transportation so you need to own a car?
Who knows but alot of us wouldn't take public transportation if it stopped by our front door.
I live in Tokyo, I do not get this sense here.
"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears"
Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
For real. I’m Gen X and don’t know anyone my age into their career at all, let alone foolish enough to worry about being productive for someone else.
While I wouldn't go that far myself, as a fellow GenXer I remember it was us in the early 1990s who were viewed as the generation that was uninspired by work or the prospect of a career. Like Linklater's 1990 film "Slacker". Or Smith's 1994 film "Clerks". I think a lot of things that are assigned to "generations" are really just due to age. Younger people aren't that into work, often because the intro-level jobs they have aren't that exciting or lucrative. But that's fine because they don't have much in the way of expenses or dependents. As people get older they get more into work both because the work is more engaging and that they actually have expenses and responsibilities.
> I think a lot of things that are assigned to "generations" are really just due to age.
This. So-called "Generations" are nothing more than marketing names, completely arbitrary slices of time. At this point, the only purpose of generations seems to be to write media stories about generations.
There's actually a great deal of diversity within generations. Demographically speaking, kids mostly end up a lot like their parents. There are trends over time, but those trends tend to move slowly.
I also feel like it has something to do with the aging process itself, perhaps biochemical. When I was younger I just wanted to hang around and try to find girls to fuck. The idea that I would enjoy working was crazy to me. Now in my 30s and with a family, work and contributing to society starts to seem more interesting rather than just something I half-ass for the money. I'm not totally sold on it yet but maybe in another 10 years I will be.
> being productive for someone else.
Marxist alienation is in da house.
Don’t have to go that far. I’m productive when doing my own things, but if I’m taking a salary, my productivity is my employers concern, not mine.
Seriously, forgive me while I compose myself
I'm a millennial that gives their gen X brother a place to live... his life was a continuous reminder that hope [where we grew up] was misplaced.
I succeeded despite everything
Although Gen X is categorises by apathy and cynicism, subsequent generations still feel that Gen X just managed to squeeze in with the boomers before the door narrowed. Especially regarding property prices.
A lot of it is probably just timeless inter-generational resentment but it doesn't help that boomers still haven't retired and caused a logjam.
I see the media has lost it's fascination with blaming millennials for everything that's wrong in the world. Gen Z, buckle up!
(I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
Bare effort mondays? Quiet quitting?
It seems like Gen-Z has come up with terms that describe basic human behaviour, and the media is running with it as some shocking new phenomena. Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
>It seems like Gen-Z has come up with terms
Media propagandists serving the capitalist class invented those terms, not Gen Z. Zoomers are not in power anywhere.
>Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
It's not "half assing" but rather "acting your wage" aka being aware enough to realize you're not paid enough to put yourself in danger or lose sleep over some bullshit when you're barely paid enough to survive.
You don't have to be "in power" to coin terms. Teenagers on TikTok come up with more cultural commentary and introduce more new verbiage and lingo than the US Senate.
These terms did not originate organically. They get invented by "HR consultants", think tanks, C-suite pundits, etc. then pushed heavily by corporate media. It's basic astroturfing.
The author doesn't consider our parents and their parents didn't own a modern house walking distance from dinning and entertainment which is what most people aspire to today. They also married very young, had three kids before 25 and signed up for 30 year loans to pay their cookie cutter suburban homes. You could technically do the same today, it's just that living that type of life would be absolutely terrifying for many. On a separate note, I work with many Gen Zs and they don't fit the stereotype everyone talks about. In my experience they are hardworking, motivated and make amazing teammates. They aren't complaining about how stressful is to work 40hr/week from home.
>Own a house walking distance from dinning and entertainment
My parents and their parents did. Neither were rich. Perhaps not super bougie places but they had various community things nearby like dancing, bowling, bars, gyms, malls, etc. Detroit and detroit metro.
Every area is different but actually being walking distance to stuff was always pretty unusual.
This isn't about modern houses. Houses built in the 70s are also incredibly expensive.
What's terrifying there? I mean the 3 kids at a young age sounds like more than I could have handled but everything else you wrote sounds like the dream.
The expenses and debts that it would entail along with precarity.
Hustle culture is a form of CYA for poor managers. If I, incompetent manager, hammer on my employees to hustle, I can claim I am doing my best to manage my team and any deficiency must be their fault because I've set the standard.
Nevermind that every job is different and the outcomes are measured very differently and sometimes "hustling" or "staying busy" is actually a substandard way of achieving most tasks consistently as the short term benefits of hustling give way to burnout.
Bad managers are asking employees to constantly sprint when business is a marathon. It's a weak form of leadership generally ascribed to the "professional" managers with (only) business school backgrounds who can't understand what their employees actually do nor understand the system of the company as a whole.
It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.
Employees have for centuries been doing this sort of thing. Looking busy by optimizing for busyness over actual productivity because they realize managers are only concerned with looking good and skating by, not the actual business outcomes.
Note for those starting a business: design your corporate structure so that middle managers incentives are visibly aligned with the actual success of the company and not with visible working culture. And then set the pace properly.
A motor cannot work at 100% duty cycle and maintain it's longest possible service life before being rebuilt.
I find it quite ironic that the author cares so much about housing costs and presumably money, but at the same time she chose a profession that has a low average salary.
If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
If everyone picked low-GDP professions like her then in the extreme case you’d have a country like Democratic Republic of Congo with low housing costs but also you’re practically squatting in nature in a hut.
>If everyone picked low-GDP professions
If everyone picked high-GDP professions, society would collapse. Imagine a world where everyone is a CEO and nobody knows how to fix a water main or run a cafeteria.
>If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
We should start by paying better for the things people already do. Rewarding those who keep the lights on incentivizes keeping the lights on.
1. The price of a 1 bedroom apartment in Congo’s capital city center is literally double that of Berlin. 2. My personal definition of a failed society is one that fails to fulfill the basic needs of its people.. and yes, that includes people with a profesion that has a low average salary.
Working harder and smarter are two different things. Productivity has nothing to do with working harder, otherwise china's labor force would be the most productive in the world. It's not. Mexico has twice the productivity of China
Most productive countries are those who work smarter. See the list for yourself
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...
You only get to decide how much productivity is enough if the world is not competitive. Which it is.
Your output is driven by the guy who's gonna eat your lunch otherwise, not by your vibe.
How does that work within the context of an office place? Not all corporations have internal cultures that encourage competition between coworkers. And at some point it's no longer productivity that causes one to get ahead, but politics.
Competition still applies. It your company has a culture where delivering doesn't matter, you are gonna be taken out by one that does.
Thats why I've enjoyed working for the government for the past couple decades. I'm pretty confident that a good chunk of the code I write will never make it to production.
As an aside, wouldn't you enjoy some degree of pride if you could claim otherwise? Like "every licence plate number in Kentucky is generated by an algorithm I wrote" or some such?
But then you would be automating away the comedy of this
https://fox56news.com/news/kentucky/rejected-2022-kentucky-p...
Maybe. But this process can take decades. Even longer than your entire career in some cases.
If you can be confident that you can coast your whole life and be well-off, then I have no argument against it.
If you are not confident, or perhaps want to make sure your children have a work ethic that is more likely to give them a good life - then it's a big risk to assume you can chill and all will be fine.
The OP isn't coasting, it's about not maximizing productivity for the sake of it. It's about striking the right balance, avoiding burnout, working smarter not harder. Too often productivity becomes a cargo cult of austere asceticism rather than something that actually enriches one's life. Some days it's okay to work-to-rule.
I think these types of writing while appropriately labeled as opinions, are doing a dis-service for the general public especially the youth, the specified generation.
Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
Pay them more. Otherwise the work goes undone. Civilization is not entitled to cheap, disposable labor.
>Otherwise the work goes undone.
Or migrants get imported to do the work that goes undone, see EU.
You can import them, but you can't force them to work - see Germany, Sweden, etc. ;)
Not if they don't have access to welfare without contribution.
Don't forget, the US allows slavery as a punishment for crimes. Criminalize homelessness and you solve your cheap disposable labor problem.
Or maybe it's time to stop missing the forest for the trees. Not being paid enough is hardly the primary issue. We desperately need a crash.
Asset prices are not wages. The latter is necessary for workers to survive, the former are imaginary numbers. One would expect the requirement to both cram down asset prices and push wages up for a healthy economy. It’s pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
“A crash” is just a Rube Goldberg wealth redistribution mechanism (wealthy people own the vast majority of securities and real estate). I argue a crash isn’t what’s needed: much more housing supply, robust antitrust enforcement (to keep monopoly pricing in check), efficient healthcare, living wages, and high progressive tax rates are what is needed to right the ship.
The issue is that there's entirely too much "short term thinking", which is code for "there is no one to speak for the middle class any longer". Yes, it's magic numbers and estimations stamped as iron-clad all the way down, but notions of a "healthy economy" are strictly contextual. "Software is eating the world" (h/t a16z), "1bn VR users by 2027" (zuckerberg), "100k starting" -- there's a clear imbalance, and sometime after '99 the economic model clearly shifted from "enable a better life" to "controlled demolition". We even saw bankers get paid for it!
IMO it doesn't matter if you believe in fire or in ice, either will suffice. There's only one way forward.
Lol, what?
The problem around here seems to mostly be there is no housing at all for slog-worthy workers. You can con them into taking out crazy college loans they'll never pay off and an individual can remain in denial about astronomical healthcare and nonexistent retirement prospects during their day to day, but workers have yet to develop the ability to teleport to and from work so that no housing needs to be built near these poorly paying jobs.