"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote.<p>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<i>.<p>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.<p></i>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).
"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"<p>Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
I see the media has lost it's fascination with blaming millennials for everything that's wrong in the world. Gen Z, buckle up!<p>(I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
Bare effort mondays? Quiet quitting?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.<p>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.
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<p>Most productive countries are those who work smarter. See the list for yourself<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...</a>
You only get to decide how much productivity is enough if the world is not competitive. Which it is.<p>Your output is driven by the guy who's gonna eat your lunch otherwise, not by your vibe.
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!?).