Talk:The future of office work

Kyla Scanlon’s argument

TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is 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 of her frenetic tiktoks, podcasts, tweets, blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, just, she has the lived experience to weigh in and recently did so.

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.

Things have changed. The nature of how we now are — networked, digital and online — and what we now do — delivering services like “B2B SaaS” instead of making goods in factories — means 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 — 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.

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 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, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: Can we change? What? And how?

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

—Anon.

In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid proved it. But this is a bit like saying we can eat peas with a knife. The nature of corporate work is inherently collaborative, in the way social media influencing probably isn’t. Is the best way of delivering services to have staff sequester themselves in their box rooms and interact solely through the medium of Slack, Zoom and Teams?

Seeing as digital communication constrains us to formal, metered, monitored channels, this should at least not be taken for granted. See last week’s piece on the org chart.

Is there something different, then, about Generation Z? Yes:

The younger generation, notably Gen Z, grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitized world.

Scanlon says we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. Here, kids, is what you missed:

There were barely and civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights you’d recognise, beyond suffrage, until the boomers won them for you. No-one had even thought of trans rights. South Africa was apartheid, Berlin was partitioned, there were hot wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel and of course the big Cold one between East and West. There was widescale nuclear proliferation: people built fallout shelters in their basements and schoolkids planned how best to lose their virginity in the event of a four-minute warning. There were civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia and Uganda (plus a famine which only Boomer Geldof could fix) and multiple military coups, in Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and plenty of other places, and revolution in Iran. There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and meanwhile across Europe, Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. The 1970s were also the worst decade of most industrialised countries’ economic performance since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave in America, New York went bankrupt and there was a catastrophic war on drugs, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe and economic malaise culminating in a series of severe financial recessions, crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, while eastern Europe slowly failed under oppressive, coordinated, communist regimes. There were student loans back then, too. The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed anyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with industrial pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, the threat of nuclear winter, Dutch elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. In the mean time, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, acid wash, flares, permanent waves and listen to disco and new romantic music, the architecture and urban planning, with brutalist housing estates, sucked — and there was no internet.

Things were really shit in the decades before you were born, kids. The boomers and generation X sucked it up. Now it’s your turn.

Why don’t we change, then? Scanlon attributes this to intransigence, and a little bit, to embittered generations who themselves went through the meatgrinder, and don’t see why the next generation shouldn’t too.

Boomers expect everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not smart work, is a kind of religion.

“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. ... [but] to be unable to envision a future different from the present is pea-brained.”

And that seems to be it: beyond saying we shouldn’t mock younger generations (I’m not sure why not: they seem happy enough to mock older ones) and we shouldn’t close our minds to new ways of working, which is certainly true, but those new ways of working really need to be different.

None of Scanlon’s reasons are new. Circadian rhythms have been out of whack since threshers collapsed in a heap in front of the fire in the seventeenth century. Max Weber’s “iron cage” of hierarchy, rules, and process has been with us since, well when Weber noticed it, in 1904.

Jemima Kelly’s argument

Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?

Good questions, but again: this time isn’t different. No-one — except maybe Steven Schwartzman — glorifies the daily grind. Like greed, it isn’t actually good: it is inevitable. We have configured the way we work, the complex system that is the grand game of financial services pass the parcel, so that it is this elaborate game of formal hoop-jumping and box ticking. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest art, the highest aspiration of professional life.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be our fault for giving them false expectations, or a function that, as social conditions improve, incidence of neuroticism necessarily increases.

We need to work out how to get the balance right between the Zoomer-style coddling and the Boomer-style stiff upper lip — that’s tricky.

Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable Nietzsche, but it is no more than seeking out antifragility. Along that axis, if the choice is between coddling and stiff upper lip, it is easy: stiff upper lip.

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Her video shorts are never earnest: she saturates them with state-of-the-art memery and velocity: everything gallops between with frenetic jump cuts, Burroughs like cut-ups and frame shifts that speak to the easily-distracted multi-channel, hyperlinked, always-on dot-dot-dash attention spans of the digital native but don’t necessarily make sense. Well, not to me, at any rate: they are often far too quick for this old codger to make out, let alone follow, and they’re gone before you get a chance to mull over or analyse for content.

In any case you can’t help but admire, and maybe be sucked in by, the energy and brio of the delivery. You wonder what it would be like if you got to slow it down and treat it like an old-fashioned, boomer thought piece.

Well, Scanlon lets you do that, too. Her Substack is almost as popular as her TikTok, and definitely a lot more popular than this one!

Scanlon is unrepresentative of her generation in other ways, too. Her expectation for some

That same lazy, boomer categorisation of millennials as “attention-depleted dilettantes who conduct their self-absorbed lives through social media” isn't generally true even of the metropolitan liberal cohort we have in mind, let alone the rest of the world's twenty-two year olds, of whom the “digital native” stereotype is starkly atypical.

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Ambitious kids work like tyros, wherever they are. And are the progeny of the professionally qualified upper middle classes of London, New York and California necessarily as driven and (figuratively) hungry as poor kind in Nairobi, Damascus or Kyiv? The JC has no data, but he doubts it. Who is more likely to complain about burnout after a nine to five?