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I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and i am in person, and I am commenting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, ''crazy''.}} | I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and i am in person, and I am commenting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, ''crazy''.}} | ||
In the | TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|Kyla Scanlon}}, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million [[Followers|followers]] of her frenetic tiktoks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]], blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, ''just'', she has the [[lived experience]] to weigh in and recently did so.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref> | ||
Back in the day, she says, agrarian societies worked daylight hours only giving up their circadian rhythms when forced to by the industrial revolution. It took Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — to realise he would get more out of his workers if he paid them properly and gave them time off. So was born, apparently, the nine-to-five: visionary, but that was a hundred years ago. | |||
''[[This time it’s different|Things have changed]].'' The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]]” instead of making goods in factories — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]]. | |||
Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked a regular agrarian day out in the fields, or ''who'' still uses the eight-hour day, since it definitely isn’t the financial services industry or its professional advisors<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, dispense a bit of tough parental love: an eight-hour day in an office downtown with a commute each side of it is, across the epochal sweep of human perseverance, ''no great imposition''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working in your jim-jams from the kitchen table. | |||
So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs ''can'' be delivered remotely. | |||
{{quote| | |||
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.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.}} | |||
But is Scanlon’s conception of what her generation, in general, can reasonably expect from professional working life any less informed by the world ''she'' inhabits personally? Hers is a trajectory few twenty-somethings can sensibly aspire to. Look, if they could be financial services influencers, they would. Wouldn’t we all? But the market is small. | |||
But, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''? | |||
{{quote| | |||
I eat my peas with honey<br> | |||
I’ve done it all my life<br> | |||
It makes the peas taste funny<br> | |||
But it keeps them on the knife. | |||
:—''Anon''.}} | |||
In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] proved it. But this is a bit like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. Work in professional services — IT, law, finance, accounting, design, architecture, consulting — is inherently collaborative, in the way “social media influencing” isn’t. Is the ''best'' way of collaborating to have your people sequester themselves in their box rooms, interacting solely through the media of Slack, Zoom and Teams? And is it best for ''them'': Digital natives are as captive as the rest of us to the urge for advancement, compensation, stimulation and kudos, and your best shot at that is if you are there, on the spot, when the opportunity arises. Few will stop and ring around the home-workers to see who’s about, if there’s a bright-eyed youngster right in front of you, raring to go. | |||
And seeing as digital communication constrains us to formal, metered, monitored 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 that makes them more suited to a different rhythm? ''Yes'', says Scanlon: | |||
{{quote| | |||
... Gen Z, grapples with an evolving definition of work. 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.}} | |||
Look, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. Unprecedented challenges? ''Really''? | |||
{{quote|There were barely and civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights you’d recognise, beyond suffrage, until the boomers won them for you. No-one had even ''thought'' of trans rights. South Africa was apartheid, Berlin was partitioned, there were hot wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel and of course the big Cold one between East and West. There was an out-of-control nuclear arms race: people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning. There were civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and a famine which only Boomer Bob Geldof could fix, and ''multiple'' military ''coups d’état'', in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and plenty of other places, and revolution in Iran. There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and meanwhile across Europe, Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt and the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called ''Never Mind The Bollocks'', there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, while the other side the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe slowly went to violent pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes. The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, Dutch elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and dig Nik Kershaw, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked — and there was ''no internet''.}} | |||
Things were ''really'' shit in the decades before you were born, kids. | |||
She might object she is talking only about that cohort that is already in the Bay area, or Hoxton. But that’s not how it works: ambitious kids work like tyros, wherever they are. Will the coddled progeny of the professional middle classes of London, New York and California be as driven or hungry for advancement their equivalents in Nairobi, Damascus or Kyiv? Don’t bet on it. Who would you say is more likely to complain about burnout from a nine to five? | |||
But, Scanlon might say, “okay, but ''that was then''. Thanks, and all, but it is ''different'' now. Why don’t we change ''now''?” She puts it down to intransigence and, a little bit, to we of the embittered prior generations, who trot out commonplaces like the screed above, and don’t see why the next generation can’t suck it up too. | |||
{{quote| | |||
“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.<ref>I doubt anyone actually says that, in so many words, but rather Scanlon imputes it.</ref> … [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 — personally, I’m not sure why not: they seem happy enough to mock us — 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 barley 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, a hundred and twenty years ago. | |||
If things really will change, these aren’t the arguments. | |||
The FT’s Jemima Kelly — a few years older than Scanlon and “best known for snark, sarc & Sark” against the run of play added her support. too. | |||
{{quote| | |||
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: is this time different? No-one — except maybe Jamie Dimon and Steven Schwartzman — ''glorifies'' the daily grind. Like greed, it isn’t actually ''good'', so much as ''inevitable''. We have configured the way we work — the grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual 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. | |||
{{quote| | |||
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. But here is the thing. If the [[high modernist]] ideals of our consultant overlords were true, and the highest plane to which we could aspire was the flawless pursuit of abstract [[form|''form'']]: checking boxes, following policies, giving approvals, pushing buttons — then, and only then, ''remote working would be perfect''. For bureaucrats need no interaction. Bureaucrats are there to ''prevent'' unplanned interaction. | |||
If this really were how business worked, overheads would be slashed, IT and real-estate infrastructure outsourced to the staff, and the scope for bumptious worker-drones to have bright ideas and flashes of inspiration would be pared back to the minimum. This would be some kind of Gilliamesque autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while the overwatched by loving telecreens. But it would work. | |||
In any other universe, getting together in a central office appeals. | |||
{{quote| | |||
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, every time. | |||
==== It isn’t COVID any more ==== | ==== It isn’t COVID any more ==== | ||
Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. We reacquainted ourselves with our local | Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. We reacquainted ourselves with our local neighbourhoods, clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, got to know green spaces, avoided the tube and still by most measures, our productivity ''rose'' during lockdown. But COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time: | ||
First, there was ''nothing else to do'', bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work. | First, there was ''nothing else to do'', bar pacing the perimeter at a safe distance from other humans and listening to podcasts. No wonder we threw ourselves into work. | ||