Talk:The future of office work

Kyla Scanlon’s argument

Kyla Scanlon is a whip-smart Gen-Z “content creator” who makes short-form videos, podcasts and blogs “analysing the economy with a human-focused lens”. She has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Scanlon’s style is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and millennial: she is, says the grumpy old man, a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be.

Being of Generation Z — just — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort, seeing as her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience. But that makes her an outlier: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination, so whatever you make of her material, she hardly represents the lived experience of even her immediate cohort: a narrow demographic of affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals. She is hardly well placed to speak for her wider generation, including kids in the poorer neighbourhoods of Kinshasa, Kyiv or Karachi.

In any case Scanlon starts with some potted anthropology — in agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours, giving up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution, and it took Henry Ford — not usually a Gen Z pin-up, but still — to recognise he would get more out of his workers by paying them more and asking of them less.

So was born the nine-to-five, she says, and the western world has, arbitrarily, stuck with it ever since. But the nature of how we are — networked, digital, online — and what we do — we’ve pivoted from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) — means it’s different this time.

Let’s take Scanlon’s history as read and park our questions — such as how “TikTok girl” would have found an agrarian day out in the fields, or who exactly it is who is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour work day, since it definitely hasn’t been financial services industry or their professional advisors — but let’s be clear: an eight-hour day in an air-conditioned office with a commute each side of it is no great trial. It might be dull, sure, but that is a different question, not addressed by where or for how long you are expected to do your job.

Are there other reasons to think things have changed? Scanlon argues that, unlike production line jobs, services can be delivered remotely. This is presented as self-evident fact.

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 limited sense it is true: in times of extraordinary necessity, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid has proved it. But this is like saying we can eat peas with a knife. But is this the best way of delivering services? When staff sequester themselves in their box rooms and interact solely through the medium of Slack, Zoom and Teams, are they working at their best?

Scanlon’s arguments begin to lose force as she goes on. Generation Z, she says, is special:

Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.

The problem is boomers like Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman expecting everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not smart work, is a religion. but seeing as Gen Zers have it worse than anyone else the payoff is no longer worth it. the only reason we even tolerate is that it is enforced by modernity, artificial constraints and, basically habit.

Ironically, Scanlon says, “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.” Yet this is more or less where she comes from: she can’t envision a world different from the one she inhabits personally. But Kyla Scanlon’s world, with a roaring influencer presence and a Bloomberg column aged twenty five - is hardly an ordinary one.

To be unable to envision a future different from the present is pea-brained.

Why should we change it: there are biological reasons, like circadian reasons. (but these have existed since before the industrial revolution: they are no reason to change now). Or Max Weber’s iron cage of hierarchy, rules, process and dehumanising PowerPoints. (again, these are not unique to Gen Zers, so that is not what makes things different)

and that seems to be it: Beyond that we shouldn't mock young generations (though actually we should: they mock us happily enough) and we shouldn't close our minds to new ways of working.

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.

You come away impressed but never quite sure if you’ve watched some next-level, uber-hip, tenth-Dan free-form improvisational genius, or something that just looks like it. Have a look at her most recent one — “Federal Reserve Recap with Jerome Powell” — and judge for yourself. 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?