Talk:The future of office work

Kyla Scanlon’s argument

Kyla Scanlon is a whip-smart Generation Z “content creator” who makes short-form videos, podcasts and blogs “analysing the economy with a human-focused lens”.

Scanlon’s style, which has earned her hundreds of thousands of subscribers, is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and millennial.

Being of Generation Z — just — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort. And her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience: she is 25, self-employed with a Bloomberg column and a podcast.

But that makes her an outlier, not an archetype: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination at all, let alone aged 25, so she barely represents the lived experience of even her immediate cohort — affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals — let alone the young people of rural China or even metropolitan Istanbul.

Still, she tells us not to snigger: TikTok Girl is right. She starts with some potted anthropology — agrarian societies worked during daylight hours and gave 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 more and asking less.

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

Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an average agrarian day in the fields, or who, exactly, stuck with the eight-hour work day, since it definitely wasn’t the 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 not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working from home.

But are there other reasons to think things have changed? Scanlon argues that, unlike production line jobs, services jobs can be delivered remotely.

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 it is true: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid has proved it. But this is like saying we can eat peas with a knife. 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?

In that it constrains communication to formal, metered, monitored push 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:

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.

This is something that could only come from the Generation Z.

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.

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?