A new generation is saying no to the stressful career ladder

There’s a new mood among young women who are rejecting the full-on career models of an earlier generation. Meet the #lazygirls

She’s no lazygirl. Actor Reese Witherspoon in scene from Legally Blonde 2.

The Girlboss is dead, and the Lazy Girl has risen from her ashes.

Since the pandemic, an anti-work sentiment has been building among young people: from the mass exodus of workers during the Great Resignation of 2021 to the recent “quiet quitting” movement, which encouraged workers to silently withdraw their time and commitment from their workplace.

#Lazygirljob is the latest incarnation to take root on TikTok. In brief, young people, mostly women, are rejecting the hustle culture of our millennial forebears in favour of undemanding, decently paid middle-management jobs where the breaks are long, and the stakes are non-existent.

The hashtag has more than 14 million views and is littered with videos of proud lazy girls detailing how easy their working lives are. One video is captioned, “All I do is copy and paste the same emails, take 3-4 calls a day, take my extra-long break, take more breaks, AND get a nice salary”. Another video reads: “I love my lazy girl job. I don’t have to talk to people, only come to the office twice a week.”

It’s not a phenomenon that exists solely online. A proudly lazy friend recently extolled the virtues of her “mouse jiggler” – a device she ordered from Amazon that keeps her cursor active while she “works remotely” – ie, re-watches ­episodes of Nashville.

To borrow a TikTok buzz phrase, Gen Z “don’t dream of labour”, and the stats back it up. A survey from Workspace Technology found that just 49 per cent of Gen Z say work is central to their identity, compared with 62 per cent of millennials.

The same study found that almost half (47 per cent) of Gen Z said that if their employer didn’t provide hybrid or remote options, they would look for jobs elsewhere. Angelica Hunt, senior marketing lead at the diversity, equity, and inclusion firm The Dream Collective, says that the #lazygirljob movement is born out of an ever-growing misalignment between companies and workers.

“Companies simply aren’t walking the walk regarding inclusion. Flexibility and hybrid working options are being reduced by companies mandating returning to the office and, in some cases, reverting to pre-Covid inflexibility,” she says.

Hunt believes that as Gen Z changes jobs at a higher rate than any other generation, they have realised that the issue exists wherever they go and are taking matters into their own hands in designing a working life that works for them.

“They want a work/life blend where they feel their work is in synergy with their lives, not in conflict with it,” she says.

“They’ve learned from their parents’ generation that pouring your whole life into work at the expense of all else may not be paying off as much as they once thought.”

In his widely circulated 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber argued that carrying out these so-called bullshit jobs will eventually gnaw away at one’s psyche.

“How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?” he wrote.

Dr Anna Denejkina, the research director for YouthInsight, the research arm of Student Edge, argues that it is the perception of one’s work being considered useless that may be the core issue, rather than the work itself.

“We need to consider what can be done to change the social environment that produces these viewpoints and perceptions in the first place,” she says.

She says work that is stress-free or less demanding is not necessarily menial and won’t lead to feelings of the job being useless.

Hustle culture, she adds, “can breed the idea that individual success comes from your success at work, and this can be dangerous as it can conflate work success with life happiness”.

On a macro level, Denejkina says this disillusionment with the grind is a reaction to the decline in “absolute mobility” we’ve seen since the 80s, compounded with economic failings, out-of-reach housing, and the cost-of-living pressure. “With the large number of life stressors already impacting young people today, it’s expected that many are prioritising their wellbeing and looking for work that is stress-free or less demanding.”

If pop culture is a bellwether of the times, consider the media diet of millennial women: Ugly Betty, The Devil Wears Prada, Legally Blonde – all stories about women with capitalist ambition and talent. For Gen Z, that kind of neoliberal, aspirational girlboss figure is cringe; instead, we’ve found messy, barely-employed heroes in Fleabag and Lena Dunham’s Girls.

One need only look to the undisputed “It” girl book of the past five years: Ottessa Moshfeg’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which the unnamed protagonist checks out of the hustling New York art scene to devote an entire year to slumbering in her Upper East Side apartment. While spending months in a drug-­induced hibernation sounds divine, for most of us that’s out of reach. We’ll have to make do with the rewarding work involved in firing off a few emails before an extended lunch break.