Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety
businessinsider.comPerhaps a better title for this article would be: "Business leaders are bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety"
With the popularity of 'hot desking', overbearing micromanagement, unrealistic expectations, and continuous surveillance/activity monitoring.. who can blame people for being stressed / anxious at work?
If employees aren’t expected to come into the office often, hotdesking is a perfectly fine trade off for the people that spend the majority of their time at home.
A lot of offices are doing forced RTO at the same time they are introducing hot desking. So...you need to come in 3-4 days a week now, and no, you won't have your own desk. It is like, come back to the office we miss you! But, well, we don't miss you that much.
I think with hot desking, however, the writing is on the wall that RTO will ultimately fail more often than not. And that ya, these people are eventually going to come in 0-2 days a week, and not the majority 3-4 days a week.
It feels like "progress" and "change" are glacial. I'm about to turn 50. I have been in tech since I was 23.
When I first entered the workforce there were more people doing the same amount of work than happens today. From 93-2000 I watched tons of companies lay off staff and spread the work to the remaining people. Then the same thing happened in 2008-10. Then the same thing happened over the last 5 years.
The new normal (because of the decades of change):
No one has time or space to focus, everyone is asked to do too much. So no one has time to do quality work so we feel like our work is shitty and we can't take pride in our work - yet we spend most of our waking hours hours doing that work. Which impacts our quality of life and increases our stress levels.
Maybe that's why everyone is anxious.
That reflects my experience. To top it off, your healthcare (including mental health) being tied to your job makes the layoff even more anxiety inducing.
It's not everyone though. The article is specifically about the disparity between the newest entrants and those who came before.
> But Gen Zers, who are just beginning their career journeys, are having an especially difficult time. In a 2022 survey by the meditation app Calm, 58% of Gen Zers said they felt anxious frequently or all the time — a big jump from the one-third of Gen Xers and one-quarter of baby boomers who said the same. A Deloitte survey of 22,000 people from March found a similar result: Nearly half of Gen Zers said they felt anxious and stressed almost all the time, while only 39% of millennials said they felt the same.
> In a survey conducted by Gallup, nearly half of workers ages 18 to 29 reported that their job had negatively affected their mental health. In some cases, the stress of the workplace manifests as a sense of ambivalence and withdrawal from their professional lives. Another Gallup survey found that Gen Z was the least engaged group in the workplace and the most burned out from their jobs.
The lower end of the cohort has barely worked long enough to be worrying about layoffs or lack of pride in their work. My own career only started at 30. This is the generation that bullied parents and teachers around for years with weaponized psychobabble and made pronoun enforcement a thing (like we live in a goddamn MUSH).
Now they're entering the workplace and finding that being a master wordsmith of Reddit rhetoric doesn't translate to economic value. Their only path to success involves cancelling everyone critical of them to invoke the Peter Principle, and if they can't do that, they melt down.
Gen Z is stressed out because the world is incredibly expensive and competitive for them in a way it wasn’t for elder millennials and other older generations.
That’s really all there is to it.
Or maybe they are the youngest cohort now in the workforce and so get the least interesting jobs and the least slack. Soul of a New Machine quotes Tom West saying (roughly), The problem with brain-dead jobs is that you go home too tired to do anything.
I don’t believe my gen z colleagues have more anxiety than my gen x colleagues. However they are socialized to talk about it more, and possibly to sometimes medicalize ordinary emotional experiences. I think it’s good we’re talking about it.
There is a contradiction in the intersection of "bring your whole self to work"-type organizations and "except that"[this article].
At the root of this is emotional alienation - the fundamental realization that workers are a means to an end, a class of people divorced from one of the core ideas of what makes people human - emotion.
When displaying emotions makes management uncomfortable, I see a great opportunity to dig in and start with five whys. Equally possible, could management simply not experience discomfort?
if you can't do anything without being surveilled, are constanlty compared, and publicly shamed on worldwide media, guess what you may get.
I don't know what's holding people back from starting the talk about public health effects of the new online 'cigarettes'
Devil's advocate here...But isn't that all of us? We're all in the same fishbowl, why is the Gen Z experience more anxiety-based?
I don't think they are.
I had to listen to similar comments about Millennials.
It's just the current youngest group, who are the least experienced so will be the most anxious. You just grow out of it, and forget how shitty it was when you first entered the workforce.
IDK, have you read "The Coddling of The American Mind"? Book or even just the article?
Or even Michael Easter's "Comfort Crisis"?
Each successive generation has had it easier and easier but...
1) Easy isn't how we evolved
2) The lack of adversity means some emotional muscles are underdeveloped
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
I'm not American, so no I have not read an article about why American children are being coddled.
However it is a well known phenomen that the youngest generation gets picked on by those already in the workforce. Or are you saying that Gen X is still generally worthless compared to the older generations?
The idea that Chris Rock was being a prick and mocking a group of people being unacceptable and rejected isn't any more surprising than comedians making racist or disabled jokes being rejected 30 years ago.
There are plenty of actually funny people who don't need to do that.
> why is the Gen Z experience more anxiety-based?
Aside from being entitled and incompetent, they've brought domestic violence into the workplace to obfuscate this fact. They know it, and they live in fear of having what they do to others done to them. You see it in prison too-- the tension is palpable.
Post-COVID, the number of bad-faith HR reports I've had to investigate has skyrocketed. People are trying to get exes fired for sexual harassment, bosses fired for criticizing them, colleagues fired for being abrasive...it's driving me up the fucking wall. I get people pulling Sam Altmans too, which is fun. I used to work with professionals. Now I do the dirty work of adult tweens.
Nominal family structure is quite different and has changed rapidly in the past 50 years. Some family structures are much higher anxiety.
Which family structures “are” (cause? correlate with?) higher anxiety?
E.g. families that have normal checkins at dinner time are lower anxiety.
cause they are at school and in their formative social experiences
Also, possibly a hot take, but many have been on caffeine since early teens, I am convinced the average person’s anxiety is 30 or 40% higher when on several caffeinated beverages a day
You mean social media?
Curious why social media is to blame when adults exploiting and denigrating youth is timeless.
When society as a whole turns a blind eye to their future struggles; drill baby drill! What you want to afford a home and a fam? Lol no; hustle culture and technology to fetishize!
Did social media manipulate the economy to deflate GenZ and empower the dying?
Was social media responsible for 2008 crash, money printing?
Government full of entitled people who don’t like what the kids had to say about them, so they retaliated.
Is it tech or is it American Civic Life that’s garbage?
anxiety is a disease. we didn't have a major war or famine so it's unlikely that material factors are so bad as to cause mass stress and anxiety like they do during wars. OTOH genz were raised under the watchful and judgemental eye of large crowds/mobs, and everyone thought that was OK. I think we will soon have convincing evidence that this sort of constant comparison is as bad as destructive addictive substances
As an anxious millennial who left social media and daily news a while ago: Yes they're a problem. But the main factor is that we're destroying our natural habitat and fueling geopolitical instability.
Both of these are extremely complex problems to solve and would require consistent efforts over generations. However the people in power are happily trading the future of humanity for more money and power, and finding support from a large section of the population in doing so.
I can't speak for everyone but this is why I have a hard time working on my next jira ticket after reading the news.
Try having that plus a bit of disability and trying to keep healthcare coverage while navigating employment/layoffs.
And yeah, seeing the temperature anomaly charts this past summer makes you wonder if anything is even going to matter in a decade or two. I’m ever glad I never wanted children; I can’t imagine the anxiety of trying to raise them in the modern world.
> that we're destroying our natural habitat and fueling geopolitical instability.
Leaving the social media bubble for the world news bubble is hardly an improvement
> Jeff, we have no news to publish today. What can we put out there?
I have an article about how Gen X is making the workplace too emotional.
> You can't publish that, Gen X is in their 50's and 60's
I have an updated revision that says that Millennials are bringing emotions and anxiety in to the workplace?
> Millennials are in their 40's Jeff, you can't publish that.
Let me find/replace it with Gen Z so we can attack the new generation who have been entering the workforce for a decade now.
> Perfect.
Gen-Z has much, much higher rates of diagnosed anxiety, autism, and ADHD.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/generation-z-and-mental-health
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/05/14/on-the-...
This is a "slow day at the news" filler thing, that's just how they be.
Obviously there are questions as to higher rates of diagnosis vs. actual high rates of mental illness. Back in my day we had a lot of anxiety, and drank a lot, to deal with it. Lord knows the Greatest Generation types were often straight up hammered at work.
> This is a "slow day at the news" filler thing, that's just how they be.
Doesn't mean we have to accept it, or distribute it.
> diagnosed
And that's the key here, we don't have the stereotype of people with bottles of whiskey in their desk drawers anymore. Kids just get picked on for dealing with their shit better than their parents.
I see Gen Z is starting to receive the same treatment Millennials received from the media as they entered adult hood.
I remember when we were blamed for killing Applebees, LMFAO, good riddance.
Basically this is old people complaining about change. I get it, I am getting old and it sucks. But being the green horn sucks too!
When I have difficulty assessing tone in an e-mail or chain of messages, I ask ChatGPT to help interpret for me. So far, it's been a helpful neutral party and does help me to step back from my own reaction and consider a perspective I hadn't thought of before. That said, it's also been pretty accurate at picking out "overly aggressive" or condescending tone.
There is a huge selection bias. Gen Z being the latest entrant is going to have people who are anxious and not well equipped for the environment who will move to other careers. These types of people will not be represented in older cohorts because they have already moved on.
the kids are alright
(GenX'er fwiw)
We need to be aggressively removing microplastics from the supply chain. They act as hormone replacements (1) resulting in declining testosterone levels (2), which in turn results in higher levels of neuroticism (3).
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33916482/
Most of humanity is exposed to equal or greater amounts of plastic and it doesn't appear to be uniformly causing anxiety related issue. It seems safe to call this a cultural thing. Young people see social media posts / celebrities talking about vulnerability stuff all the time, because it trends for whatever reason, causing them to reflect that in their own lives.