What's The Point of Working Hard Anymore?A generation raised to believe in stability is now facing burnout, uncertainty and a future that feels increasingly out of reach.
With everything happening in the world lately, I can’t help but feel helpless sometimes. As a Gen-Z, there’s this lingering feeling that all the things we’re striving for might ultimately be pointless. We spend years studying, earning degrees, skills then search for jobs, build our businesses…only to sit there at the end of the day wondering: what’s the point of all this? No matter how much I save or how frugally I live, owning a house or building any significant asset of my own feels almost impossible. Especially with the way the world is moving economically, politically and environmentally. My generation doesn’t really have the luxury of daydreaming about how many children we want or where we’d like to retire someday. Most of us are too busy to survive the present. Because let’s be honest: with the salaries people earn today and the rising cost of even the most basic necessities, it’s overwhelming. The world is still largely run by people from a different generation. People who were able to establish their lives during a completely different economic reality. A time when having a college degree actually meant something rare. Something valuable enough to secure your place in society. Back then, education was often enough. Which is probably why it feels as though many of the people shaping today’s policies and economic systems are creating a world that benefits themselves far more than it benefits future generations.You can see this everywhere, from companies laying off hundreds of employees while executives continue receiving massive bonuses, jobs demanding years of experience for entry-level pay or entire industries replacing workers with cheaper systems in the names of “efficiency” while expecting younger generations to simply adapt. Housing prices continue to rise while salaries barely keep up with inflation, yet we’re still told that if we just “worked harder” or “saved better,” we’d eventually achieve the same stability previous generations once had. In the pursuit of cutting costs, companies reduce manpower, exploit shortcuts and hand opportunities to people with connections rather than competence. And in doing so, they slowly erode the opportunities that younger generations could have had. At the same time, our frustrations are constantly dismissed.
Gen-Z is often labelled as “lazy”, “entitled” or “unwilling to work,” when in reality, many of us are simply exhausted from trying to survive in an increasingly unstable world. By reducing an entire generation to those stereotypes, they make it even harder for young people to be taken seriously in workplaces, careers and society as a whole. “Go into the building and hand out your CV in person, that’s how you’d be able to capture their attention.” We did. So did a million other people. And in the end, our CVs still disappeared beneath alongside an endless pile of online applications for a single position. “Just get married and figure the rest out later.” Okay. So after somehow surviving burnout from juggling multiple jobs, finding time to date, meeting the right person and settling down, we’re also expected to afford a house or an apartment on top of everything else. Because where exactly are we supposed to live? Who’s paying the mortgage? What bout food, bills and daily necessities when many of us are already struggling just to sustain ourselves? And then comes the inevitable question: “When are you having kids?” Have you seen how expensive it is just to give birth to a child? Let alone raising one. All the costs, the time, the emotional labour…in an economy where event taking time off work feels impossible. And somehow, despite all of this, we’re still expected to remain optimistic. To keep smiling through burnout, instability and uncertainty, as though exhaustion itself is a personal failure rather than the natural response to the environment we were thrown into. I think that’s what older generations often fail to understand when they talk about Gen-Zs. It’s not that we don’t want to work hard. Most of us have spent our entire lives working toward something. Studying endlessly, building careers, starting businesses, learning new skills whilst trying to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. But it becomes incredibly difficult to stay hopeful when every milestone that once symbolized stability now feels painfully out of reach.
A degree no longer guarantees security. A full-time job no longer guarantees comfort. Even rest feels like a luxury people have to earn.That is why so many people my age feel so lost. Not because we lack the ambition, but because we were raised to believe that hard work would eventually lead somewhere stable, only to realize in the long run that the rules have changed somewhere along the way. Still, despite everything, I don’t think Gen-Zs has completely given up. If anything, I think we’ve simply become more aware. More cautious. More realistic about the world we inherited. We question systems because we were forced to grow up watching them fail people in real-time. We speak openly about burnout, mental health and financial struggles because pretending that everything is fine no longer works. Maybe we are exhausted. Maybe we are anxious about our future. But that does not make us lazy. It simply makes us human. Sincerely, Cherie. The Whiffler is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell The Whiffler that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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