Why Gen Z Hates Work

After Daniel Hayon, a 23-year-old from Los Angeles, graduated from Claremont McKenna in 2023, he started looking for a job. Interviewing with a fashion start-up, a real estate company, a few tech firms, and marketing agencies, he made it to the final round of 10 different job applications. “I had five or six interviews with each company,” he told me. “I did projects for all of them. It was a 12-week process, and some of the recruiters would ghost me for weeks.”

In the end, none of the companies came through. The night before his final interview for one position, he said, he was told they were “postponing the role for at least six months because the economy is shit.”

“It was a really eye-opening process,” Hayon continued. “I just had to sit down with myself and be like: Is it really my dream to do business development at this random consumer tech company?”

The short answer, he concluded, was no.

Not having anything else constructive to do, Hayon began posting on TikTok. “I was done with corporate America and wanted to start experimenting a bit,” he said. “I had a couple of videos blow up. I got around 5,000 followers.” Maybe, he thought, he could become an influencer. He started to read “strategies on finding your niche” and posted videos, mostly funny ones, commenting on drag queen races. He studied successful influencers, hoping to discern their secret sauce. “I’ve had moments throughout my career where I thought that if I really was just persistent and just started posting, maybe that could be me.”

Maybe that could be me. There are thousands—maybe millions—of Gen Zers who watch influencers on Instagram or TikTok and think to themselves: Maybe that could be me. The top influencers make serious money doing things we all do as part of daily life: renovating our apartments, taking a workout class, laughing at videos online, eating dinner with friends, walking in the park. From the viewer’s perspective, they are being paid to exist. The only difference is that they are documenting it.

“A lot of young people like me get frustrated seeing influencers making content that isn’t even interesting or funny and earning upward of six figures,” Hayon told me.

“Influencers being so open and honest about making four times as much as their old nine-to-fives, and having such flexible lifestyles, has opened my generation’s eyes into what’s possible,” Hayon said. “It makes you feel completely disillusioned, and it’s made Gen Z nihilistic about working.”

You’ve no doubt read the stories about how young people can’t get jobs. The stories are true.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for Gen Z is around 11 percent, which is more than double the national unemployment rate of 4.3 percent.

Some have blamed AI, arguing that the companies no longer need the paralegal, researcher, and customer service representative positions that young people have always filled because AI does the work faster and better. Others say young people are entering the job market at a time when the labor market is essentially frozen, and no college degree or niche skill can fix that. But here’s the thing: Gen Zers don’t want entry-level jobs. They don’t want middle-management roles either, with nearly 70 percent of my generation dismissing them as “high stress, low reward.”

One Zoomer I spoke to, Jessie, spent two years after graduation applying for 200 jobs in her chosen field—communications—with no luck. Not having a full-time job for all that time was financially stressful, she said, but she didn’t want to “suck it up and get a boring corporate job.” In other words, Jessie preferred to not work at all than to be unhappy in her job.

Yes, you boomers and Gen Xers: I can sense your eyes rolling right about now. We know what you think of us Zoomers: We have an attitude problem. But the conversations I had with fellow Gen Zers for this story suggest that it’s not so much an “attitude problem” but an Instagram-induced delusion.

You see, when you spend hours each day watching someone on the other side of your screen making money by seemingly dancing through life without much effort, you start to lose sense of what it takes to succeed in this world. If my generation tends to think that so-called “real jobs” are beneath us, it’s not because we’re lazy or are egomaniacs. (Well, okay, some of us might be.) It’s because “the top” doesn’t look so out of reach. Watching people earn a living with such seeming ease is breaking my generation’s perception of what kind of job—and life—is attainable, normal, and desirable.

 

Sophie Cohen, 27, is one of the people who has turned influencing into a profitable career. She began posting her outfits on Instagram when she was in high school, before influencing was a thing. After graduating college and moving to New York, Cohen worked as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s when she started to feel torn between her nine-to-five and her social media presence.

“My colleagues at Bloomingdale’s had been there for 25 years. It’s their whole career,” she told me. “I was starting to be like, ‘I don’t know if that’s me. I don’t see myself in these people. I don’t know if this is my dream or my goal anymore.’ ”

Cohen started to get “brand deals” (in which companies pay someone to post a photo or video with their product) and decided to take influencing more seriously. She took her savings and poured it into her new pursuit.

Once Cohen gained enough traction, she turned to influencing full time, paying her rent with the money she’d saved from her first brand deals.

“It wasn’t until the end of the year when I looked at all my finances, and I was like: ‘Whoa. This is a legit career.’ I’m making more than I did in a good corporate job.” Now, Cohen says she makes thousands of dollars for posting content promoting brands, whether it’s Nordstrom or Aperol or Crocs. “Sometimes it could be an hour of my time for $5,000 to $10,000,” she said. “That’s a month’s rent. That’s a vacation.”

Cohen said she’s now living the life of her dreams. “I make a great living. It’s a dream lifestyle. I fully work for myself.” She used to be embarrassed to admit her job was “content creation,” but not anymore. “It has become this very aspirational career, because there’s all the glamour of it, like the events and the free stuff. But I think the biggest luxury is not having to work a nine-to-five. And I think, in this day and age, for many young people, that’s what they want to be doing.”

Influencers make money in two ways. First, companies pay them to promote products or brands. And second, as influencers accumulate followers—and begin to attract advertising—they are paid a percentage of the ad revenue.

Is it any wonder that so many Gen Zers want to be influencers?

Even young people with traditional careers often aspire to be influencers, making videos of themselves at work with captions such as, “She doesn’t know it yet, but in about 10 minutes, she will receive an email asking her to do something she’s literally employed to do, and it’ll ruin her whole day.” Such videos can rack up thousands of views.

Gen Z has always had a talent for finessing the system, whether it’s selling custom merchandise on Etsy or telling everyone where their clothes are from. Indeed, roughly four in 10 millennials and Gen Zers have “side hustles,” according to Deloitte. Once upon a time, a singer like Addison Rae would have built her career singing in dives for pennies. Instead, she said her success as a pop star is a direct result of her treating her TikTok posts like a job.

Gen Z is not interested in climbing the corporate ladder either, because a senior position at a big corporation doesn’t provide fulfillment or even pride. Going to Pilates at noon does. The aspirational life we dream of feels one viral post away, making traditional jobs seem like a fool’s errand. In other words: It is about doing the least amount of work for the most amount of money.

And when we spend our days scrolling through our social media accounts, we find role models—if that’s the right term—like 32-year-old Hattie Kolp, who worked as a special education teacher before she quit to do what makes her happy: renovating her home. That’s right. She’s getting rich renovating her home.

“I had a blast the first few years I was teaching. But I got burnt out,” Kolp told me. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit and students stopped showing up to class that Kolp decided to put a little more time into her social media account.

“I was making no money. And it kind of just gave me time to really go all-in on my apartment projects and create content around them.”

Two years later, Kolp was making enough money as an Instagram influencer to quit her teaching job. Her first paid campaign was with Tempur-Pedic pillows, which she said paid her $200 to post a photo with the product. Now, she makes “significantly more” than she did as a teacher, and more than her friend who works as an ob-gyn. “She’s at the hospital every day delivering babies, and I’m here renovating my house.”

“It’s so sad,” she added. “Teaching is so underpaid. I didn’t even have health insurance. I was struggling and working hard and schlepping myself all over the city to make $45,000, in a good year, before taxes. It’s just insane.”

Meanwhile, said Kolp, “I get to be with my cats all day, which is such a dream, and I get to work with my boyfriend. I’d much rather be doing this than having to commute on the subway.”

Suzanne Starzyk, 24, is filled with envy when she sees successful influencers like Kolp. Although she is employed, more or less happily, in the healthcare field, she still craves the kind of life she sees on her screen.

“Watching influencers has changed my perception of what a good job is,” she said. “Prior to influencing becoming monetizable, a good job meant a nine-to-five at a good company. Anything other than a service job was a good job. And now I think being an influencer is above a corporate job because the associated financial success is something virtually impossible to achieve in your first 10 to 20 years in a traditional career.”

Like Hayon, Starzyk said, “It’s discouraging and unmotivating when you’re seeing people make 30 times what you make, doing things that you would genuinely enjoy way more than your normal job. Meanwhile, my eyesight is getting worse from staring at a computer, and my butt is getting flat from sitting at a desk, and I’m getting acne because I’m getting blue-light exposure all day.”

I asked Starzyk about the accusation that Gen Z has an attitude problem about work. She agreed wholeheartedly. “Our attitude problem has to do with seeing all the people doing normal, day-to-day things online and making money from it. It disincentivizes you from working hard. And it definitely disincentivizes you from taking a corporate job when you watch someone earn more money from sharing their morning routine than you do in a month or even more at your nine-to-five.”

When I met August Lamm, she had quit trying to become an art influencer, a story she had recounted in The Free Press in December. To gain followers and sell her art, she had, she acknowledged, sold her soul, pretending to care about other artists on Instagram and making “emotional disclosures,” which prompted her followers to buy more of her art. She finally became so disgusted that she disabled her Instagram account, and, in short order, gave up her computer and smartphone.

“One of my biggest strokes of luck is that I’m not hot enough to be an Instagram model. I always had to develop a skill,” she told me from her flip phone.

Gen Z, she said, is dangerously naive about what it really means to make a living from the internet.

“People come to me wanting to know the hacks to become an influencer—disregarding the fact that I’ve completely disavowed that line of work—because they want the easy way out.”

But Lamm said the idea that you live your life, snap a photo, and get compensated just doesn’t happen for the vast majority of people hoping to become influencers.

“I recently had a friend say she was going to start selling her underwear online instead of getting a job in a coffee shop, because it’s easier,” Lamm said. “But as someone who has tried to sell photos of myself online, it’s so much more work. And it’s so much more demeaning, and you can’t imagine the amount of hours you have to put into that for potentially no return.”

The internet, she said, has successfully fooled people. “For every one Pilates influencer who’s living full time off that income, there are thousands of people, if not millions, who have tried and failed.”

Lamm is not surprised that the influencer economy has penetrated Gen Z’s psyche so deeply. “Young people spend so much time on social media. So, of course, they’re going to see that as the way to live. They’re seeing the world as a place to move through and meet your needs and then you return home and you go online again.”

She continued: “It probably sounds old-fashioned and conservative, but I do think that there’s a reason why unemployed people get depressed very easily. They feel that they’re not contributing to their lives or to the world. I don’t think that that feeling is going to go away when you find a way to hack the system to make enough money to survive. It feels good when you figure out a way to exist in the world that you know is meaningful and that has momentum.”

When I asked Lamm if her art sales have suffered since going dark, she told me that the exact opposite has happened.

“Now that I’m off social media and all of my energy is going toward my work and toward my life, I’m seeing that I have so much more of it,” she said, “because instead of doing art and then figuring out how to present that art, I’m doing art and then doing more art, and then having time to relax and having time to consume art and go to the cinema and read books and hang out with friends, because there isn’t that massive time suck of presenting myself online.”

Here’s Maya’s conversation with economic commentator Kyla Scanlon about Gen Z in the job market: