Don’t call Gen Z brats for wanting a work-life balance | Ruby Stewart

It doesn’t matter what we do, Gen Zers just never seem to get it right, do we, writes Ruby Stewart. Have your say.

Gen Z can’t seem to get it right.

When it comes to finding your way in the world of work it feels like no matter what you do, there’s someone ready to tell you that you have made the wrong decision.

If you’re working a 9-to-5 then you’re boring.

If you’re studying then you’re a sheep but if you’re pursuing a non-traditional career then you’re naive.

If you’re travelling the world and chasing your wildest dreams, then critics accuse you of dillydallying through life and “how will you ever have a mortgage?”

It’s all so exhausting and why it comes as no surprise to me, as a Gen Zer, that my generation are not interested in being managers.

Gen Z workers Emerson Schubert, 20, Sienna Laan, 19, and Indi Miller, 22, want an easier work/life balance. Picture: Kelly Barnes

We can’t even figure out what career we should start with, let alone what the next five, ten or 20 years of our working life might look like.

We’re the generation of wanting to have it all so why wouldn’t we want to try as many things as possible?

Our elders may have locked into their job as freshly faced 18-year-olds and gradually worked their way up the ladder to their retirement at the ripe old age of 60 but that’s just not the dream anymore.

TELL US WHY IN THE COMMENTS

After seeing our parents and grandparents cripple themselves with backbreaking work, suddenly that life is not so appealing.

We want what they didn’t have, and maybe didn’t have the ability to ask for.

Gen Z knows that success doesn’t come without hard work.

I mean we’re the generation who finished high school and became adults during the height of Covid. We know that life is not all roses.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for something better.

What we want is flexibility, we want to enjoy the work that we are doing and hell, we also want to have some kind life outside the office.

We’re taught as children that we should feel comfortable about setting boundaries.

But as soon as we do that in our professional lives, we’re dismissed as brats.

It’s hard to see the people who once empowered us to conquer the world now criticise us for trying to find our place in it.

Let us give our weird and wonderful working habits a go and watch us flourish.

Because happy workers, who don’t spend every waking hour hating their jobs, are surely better workers.