The Antiwork Movement
The regulations introduced during the Coronavirus pandemic created a significant downturn in the economy. Subsequent regulations, fiscal policies, and government overspending have assuredly made the economy that much worse. One of the more corrosive strategies was paying people to stay home and remain absent from the work environment during the height of the virus.
This, especially among younger workers, became the genesis of the “antiwork movement”. As we enter restaurants, we are often faced with a shortage of staff, and longer wait times for meals. Many retail outlets seem to be staffed by more elderly personnel than prior to the pandemic.
While the federal government boasts a low unemployment rate, the percentage of people not working and not seeking work has sky-rocketed. The youth of Generation Z, often shortened to Gen Z, are people born in 1997 or later and are the largest participants or perhaps offenders of the “antiwork movement” - a social attitude that, since the pandemic, has blossomed.
An anonymous participant in the online Reddit “antiwork community”, using the alias, “SustainableNeo”, writes Mike Rowe's bullshit is nauseating. F**k workforce exploitation and measurement of human worth by capitalist work ethic standards. Work ethic isn't crumbling in this nation; young people are wising up to capitalist exploitation and are refusing to participate.”
An online American Commons magazine headline reads, “Gen-Z Is Anti-Work Because Past Generations Made Work Seem Futile”, suggesting that in analyzing the work environment of those that went before them, they think work is unproductive, fruitless, and meaningless. I fully suspect these same people do not appreciate the previous generation for bringing them a better standard of living than the previous generation experienced.
Of course, the one that caught my eye is a Fortune Magazine headline under climate change which states, “Gen Z’s antiwork mentality has a lot to do with the ‘world crumbling’ around them.” The single paragraph that appears prior to discovering the magazine is fully paywalled reads, “Life generally goes like this: You’re born, go to school, find a job, work for half a century, retire, and then pass the days playing bingo or getting really into Jimmy Buffett. But many Gen Zers and younger millennials feel they’ve been handed an entirely different script for life—and it doesn’t have a happy ending eating cheeseburgers in paradise.”
How mundane, monotonous, tedious, and boring they make life seem. Analyzing the author’s LinkedIn biography, I calculated Chloe Berger, to be about 32 to 33 years of age - it’s hardly a lifetime of experience, participation, and maturity to come up with her callow and shallow description of life.
From all I have read, it would seem that many in the Gen Z category, and certainly, some millennials, have bought into the politics of socialism, where they believe work doesn’t exist and the government simply provides a universal basic income. As I have written previously, Socialists will ask questions like, “How is it possible that 90% of immense wealth is in the hands of 5% of people? Obviously capitalism is a failure for the majority of people”. The reality is that under socialism everyone is poor, except the leaders in the controlling authoritarian government, and there are no wealthy, profit-oriented people to create good jobs or produce people-pleasing opportunities.
The component of those not working because of a ‘crumbling world’ due to climate change have been sold a bogus bill of goods. As evidenced by NASA, NOAA, and even the IPCC, storms with increased intensities are not occurring. Floods and droughts are as they have always been, while wildfires have actually decreased by 25%. The rate of sea level rise has not increased in a millennia. Extreme weather, weather that has been with us since the coming of age, is merely rebranded as climate change.
Many youths today, referred to by some as snowflakes have discovered many new, novel and political-oriented ways to remain lazy, lethargic, and dysfunctional for sustaining a viable society. Several sit at home looking forward to receiving debt forgiveness in acquiring their liberal arts degree in gender studies and perhaps wondering why there is no work in their discipline.