Gen Z does not dream of labor
&gt; “I don’t have goals. I don’t have ambition. I only want to be attractive.” This apathetic declaration is the start of a TikTok rant that went viral for its blatant message: to reject hard work and indulge in leisure.<p>It’s weird to see these opinions presented as a new phenomenon. Wanting to avoid work and indulge in leisure is a tale as old as time. It’s even a common theme among characters in ancient writings.<p>What is new is the way people with these feelings can go online and connect with millions of other people who want to talk about these feelings as if they were the <i>real truth</i> about life. How everyone else is wrong if they don’t see it. Many of these forums become de facto “safe spaces” where rules explicitly forbid anything other than supporting and agreeing with these perspectives.<p>It was easy to dismiss these as fringe movements when it was incels writing unhinged rants blaming women for all of their personal problems, but for some reason the media is trying to treat the “antiwork” style rants as something deeper. Of course, this falls apart when the content and actors are examined in any remotely critical manner, as famously happened when the antiwork moderator gave a disastrous direct TV interview without the carefully crafted veneer of journalistic thinkpieces obscuring the sheer absurdity of the echo chamber they’ve built for themselves.<p>I grew up just barely before internet access and social media were ubiquitous. There was no shortage of people eschewing work and embracing lives of leisure right out of high school or college. I knew a large number of people who embraced “couch surfing” lifestyles or international vagabonding as their way of life. As far as I can tell, the difference was that by the time they reached mid 20s they were quickly running out of peers who would tell them it was a good idea to embrace such a lifestyle forever. The real world catches up and you notice that your real-world friends who work normal jobs and “settle down” are actually having a good time (on average) while the vagabonding lifestyle gets progressively less glamorous as you get older.<p>Not so much in the social media era, where a new set of friends and confirmatory feedback is always just a few clicks away on your phone. Want to read posts about how it’s actually someone else’s fault that you’re not successful? No problem, the internet will deliver volumes of such content.