Talk:The future of office work: Difference between revisions
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=== Kyla Scanlon’s argument === | === Kyla Scanlon’s argument === | ||
TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|Kyla Scanlon}}, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million [[Followers|followers]] of her frenetic tiktoks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]], blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, ''just'', she has the [[lived experience]] to weigh in and recently did so.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref> | |||
Back in the day, she says, agrarian societies worked daylight hours only giving up their circadian rhythms when forced to by the industrial revolution. It took Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — to realise he would get more out of his workers if he paid them properly and gave them time off. So was born, apparently, the nine-to-five: visionary, but that was a hundred years ago. | |||
''[[This time it’s different|Things have changed]].'' The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]]” instead of making goods in factories — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]]. | |||
Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked a regular agrarian day out in the fields, or ''who'' still uses the eight-hour day, since it definitely isn’t the financial services industry or its professional advisors<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, dispense a bit of tough parental love: an eight-hour day in an office downtown with a commute each side of it is, across the epochal sweep of human perseverance, ''no great imposition''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working in your jim-jams from the kitchen table. | |||
So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs ''can'' be delivered remotely. | |||
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Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.}} | |||
But Scanlon’s conception of what her generation, in general, can reasonably expect from working life | But is Scanlon’s conception of what her generation, in general, can reasonably expect from professional working life any less informed by the world ''she'' inhabits personally? Hers is a trajectory few twenty-somethings can sensibly aspire to. Look, if they could be financial services influencers, they would. Wouldn’t we all? But the market is small. | ||
But fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''? | But, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''? | ||
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