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 — plainly, she 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.

There are not many twenty-five year olds who make a living as self-employed finance commentators, so whatever you make of Scanlon’s material, she’s not greatly representative of her cohort.

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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 someThat 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.

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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?

Being of Generation Zer — just — it is not surprising scanlon sides with her cohort , particularly seeing as her own career seems to have prescribed the idealised millennial life experience.

I'm not sure it does, beyond a narrow demographic of offspring of affluent, educated, Metropolitan professionals. She is no better placed to speak for her wider generation then are the boomers and gen Xers she implies are the problem — especially since those boomers and generation Xers are parents of this stymied generation, and not naturally disposed to wreck their life experiences. Quite the opposite, in fact, and that might be part of the problem.

In any case scanlon starts with some potted anthropology — in agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours and only gave up their circadian rhythms when forced to, by the industrial revolution when the prerogatives of mechanisation pushed them into 16-hour days on a production line, which were only whittled back down to the modern eight through various labour reforms, and it took Henry Ford — not usually a Gen Z pin-up, but still — to recognise you got more out of your workers if you paid them more and asked of them less.

We have, arbitrarily, stuck with the eight hour day ever since, and it is past time yo revisit that. The new world — post COVID, networked, digital — means this time it's different.

Let’s take that as read and park the open questions that it begs such as how TikTok girl would have enjoyed a hard day in the fields in that idealised circadian society , and whether we really have stuck with the eight-hour day ever since: professional work has never been monotonousor physically tiring as work in the fields or on a production line, and I can't think of an elite professional occupation that has paid that limit the blindest bit of attention to 5pm as a knock-off time. The European Union was so concerned about it that they legislated a “Working Time Directive” in 1999, limiting work hours to 42 hours a week, and professional workers have opted out of it ever since.lets be clear: an eight hour day is no trial. In an office environment it's easy. It might be dull sure, but that is nothing to do with the time.

Are there better reasons to think things have changed?

Well, industries have changed from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) Unlike production line jobs, services can be delivered remotely. This is presented, without evidence as a 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

In a sense it is true: in times of necessity, services can be delivered remotely. This is like saying peas can be eaten with a knife. But is this the bestway of delivering them?

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.