Talk:The future of office work
Kyla Scanlon’s argument
Kyla Scanlon is a whip-smart twenty-something “content creator” who has built an impressive cross-platform following posting short-form videos about finance. Scanlon’s style is well-informed — she is plainly someone who paid attention in college — but also funny, off-beat, wry and a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be.
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, tenth-Dan free-form improvisational genius, or something totally hip that just looks like it. Have a look at her most recent one — “Federal Reserve Recap with Jerome Powell” — and judge for yourself. It is well-executed for sure. I’m just not quite sure what “it” is.
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!
So Scanlon is unrepresentative of her generation. She is unrepresentative in another way too. 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 metropolitian 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.
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?
Being of Generation Zer — just — it is not surprising scanlon sides with her cohort , particularly seeing as her own career today is more or less the millennial experience. Scanlon earns a good crust making fun videos and doing podcasts. She is no better placed to speak for her generation then the boomers — less, in fact, because boomers and generation Xers are their parents.
agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours. Great!
with industrial revolution, things were mechanised and it went to 16 hours a day. That got whittled down to 8 through various labour reforms> then H Ford - not usually a Gen Z pin up, but still - reognised you got more work if paid more for people to do less.
Now things have changed again: Break work down to
- Job
- Commute
- Community
This can feel like a hamster wheel. (The insight, honestly!)
But now industries have changed from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) Unlike production line jobs services can be delivered remotely. Scanlon had six months of this before the pandemic intervened. As far as we can tell, she never went back.
Gen Z are 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 digitized 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.