COVID has given us a vision of an adjacent possibility: a diffused, networked virtual working world where we no longer need to slog into a centralised “in person” office space. Is this the future of work, or an aberration?
Commentators fall into two camps: yes, this time it's different, and we should embrace our online world, and no, things ought to revert to their precovid mean, and if they don't, we should make them.
The former view, often advanced by millennials, linkedin thought leaders, and run of the mill futurologists, gets more play.
It found its articulation recently in a forlorn post from TikTok girl, a tearful generation Zer struggling with the strictures of a commute. Defenders leapt to her cause, not really paying it a great deal of attention, but reading into it a wider charge of complacency among corporate leaders in not recognising legitimate complaints: the daily grind is not for for purpose. In fact TikTok girl was only really complaining about her commute — but still.
We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.
In our view having overstated TikTok girl’s argument, her defenders tend to overstate their case. Actually, modern line in an office isn't too bad. Comparatively, Generation X have it pretty good.
And nor is it embittered gen Xers who want to compel everyone back into the office. Far from it. Most of them loved lockdown, and are among the strongest refuseniks.
Was lockdown a dry run for an alternative future, or a weird, sui generis aberration where usual rules were briefly interrupted, before the system began to reorganise around them? The benefits of lockdown to the organisation began to fade, even while employees hung onto their personal upsides of home working.
We should not be surprised that established staff prefer working from home. That is not the question that businesses have to answer. That is, is preferring the on-world to the off-world in the firm’s best interest?
We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error.
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.
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.
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?