For Gen Z-Ers, Work Is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment

Opinion|For Gen Z-ers, Work Is Now More Depressing Than Unemployment

The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation. In my 20s, there seemed to be an endless supply of commentary about how we millennials were lazy and entitled, just like the members of Generation X before us were slackers. Members of Gen Z get the bad rap of being “unemployable,” because apparently they do not prize achievement for its own sake, or they’d rather be influencers because the internet has broken their brains.

Gen Z-ers don’t even deserve this perfunctory slander, because the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal over the past decade.

Certainly the job market seems grim in this moment. Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, described it as “an awful traffic jam.” “If you’re just out of college, you’re trying to merge into a freeway and nobody is letting you in,” he explained. Employers at companies like Airbnb and Intuit almost sound excited talking to The Wall Street Journal about staying lean and culling the number of employees they have, as long as it creates short-term profits.

But the whole experience of work for young people has been tortured for far longer than the economy has been stalled. Earlier this year, my colleague David Brooks spoke to a college senior who called young Americans “the most rejected generation,” describing the hypercompetition that has bled into all aspects of life, even for the most privileged college-educated strivers.

Because most job applications are submitted online, the bar to applying is so much lower than it was in the analog world decades ago, and so for any open role, applicants are competing with hundreds of people. The sense of scarcity and lack starts earlier, because so many selective colleges boast about their record-low admissions rates.

But now artificial intelligence is performing the first few rounds of culling, including early screening, which is further dehumanizing and gamifying the application process. Richard Yoon, who is an economics major at Columbia, told me that when his peers have multiple interviews for jobs in finance, he asks if they heard back from any of them. They tell him: “You don’t understand. Like 19 of those 20 interviews were with bots.”