Why Gen Z Prefer Lazy Girl Jobs and Why You Should Get One Too
It’s time to leave the hustle culture behind and remember you only have one life
The best decision I ever made was to stop feeling solely responsible for my employer’s well-being. Not to take work calls in the evenings. And, of course, to give up the constant international travel.
I was stressed, losing my interest in tech, and no amount of money in the world could make up for the loss of well-being I experienced.
It seems Gen Z figured out that losing your health over a job isn’t worth it much quicker than I did.
The hashtag #LazyGirlJobs has been trending on social media for a while now, and I’m totally here for it.
Don’t let the name confuse you. Lazy girl jobs aren’t about being lazy. They’re about prioritizing yourself over your job.
“Lazy girl job” is used by Gen Z to describe jobs with a good salary, decent benefits and normal 9–5 working hours. They believe these jobs could be the antidote to mainstream burnout culture.
Gen Z figured out that the workplace isn’t where your real life takes place earlier than other generations. And that it shouldn’t be your primary focus.
You shouldn’t let your job drain you of so much energy that you’re no longer able to have a life.
What they want are jobs that don’t expect you to give 120% all the time and that don’t ask you to pretend your workplace is the center of the universe.
They want to be able to work and still have time to enjoy life.
And I’m glad they’re figuring this out early.
Our jobs are killing us. Workplace stress impacts our mental and physical health.
According to the Corporate Wellness magazine, your job can give you a heart attack:
Studies have shown that workplace stress is a strong risk factor for preludes to cardiovascular disease (obesity, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure) and of adverse cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke.
And I believe it; I was feeling the effect. My weight and my blood pressure were steadily rising.
TikTok influencer Gabrielle Judge ushered in the era of ‘lazy girl jobs’ last summer with a couple of viral videos about how to get a well-paid, low-stress remote job.
A job that allows you the flexibility to have a life besides work. We should all be looking for one. Let’s normalize prioritizing living over working.
For me, it took a while. As a typical Gen X, I was conditioned to always try harder even if no one asked me to.
Yes, I was successful, but I was also unhappy. It was taking a toll on my health and on my social life.
When I realized that I could no longer stand working around the clock, I took a 4-month sabbatical. Lo and behold, neither the company I had been working for nor the world came crashing down.
Turns out I’m allowed to have a life.
I switched jobs, and am now enjoying my new lazy girl job as manager of a team of systems engineers.
No, it’s not that managers don’t really do any work. But what you perceive as lazy is very relative. Depending on your previous workload, a 60-hour job may seem like a walk in the park.
For me, the change from my job as an individual contributor, which was filled with back-to-back presentations, workshops and travel, to a management position felt like a vacation.
But it’s not a vacation. I have a well-paid job in a field I enjoy, working normal hours and not constantly feeling close to burning out.
And that’s the thing. We’re so conditioned to overworking ourselves that we feel like giving a normal amount of time and resources to our employers is lazy.
Gen Z has an undeserved reputation for being lazy. They’re not. They just have better boundaries.
They don’t allow someone who pays them for a 40-hour workweek to call dibs on their entire life. They have a life outside of work they want to focus on, and they look for jobs that will allow them to do that.
Naturally, the corporate world isn’t happy about this. According to Wikipedia, this trend is the result of an anti-work philosophy.
Isn’t it bizarre that doing a job and delivering the expected results is considered anti-work? Why should people be enthusiastic about their jobs?
But companies are used to people willingly giving them more than they pay for.
In 2021, Forbes reported that according to a study by the ADP Research Institute:
One in ten employees say they’ve been putting in more than 20 hours of free work per week, according to an ADP Research Institute study released Wednesday … workers on average, are logging 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime weekly, up from 7.3 hours just one year ago
But Gen Z is tired of the sacrifices the corporate world is expecting, and they don’t mind being called lazy either.
And I agree with them.
Why is doing the job you’re paid for in the time you’re paid for quiet quitting? Why are we expected to do more than we agreed to? For free?
Are companies giving us more money than they agreed to? More free time? More benefits?
Are employers “quiet-firing” their employees by not doing that?
Why is there an expectation that our company's interests should outweigh our own?
I think we all need to step back and take stock of what we want our lives to be. We have a limited amount of time we’ll be on this earth.
The lifetime that we’re giving to our employers is valuable. Every hour that is gone is irretrievable.
Maybe I feel this more strongly now than I did when I was younger. But now, at this point in my life, I’m acutely aware that every hour counts. We should be very conscious of how we spend this time.
At the end of our lives, none of us will have flashbacks to the hours we spent sitting at our desks writing emails to clients. Or to the many hours in meeting rooms.
The number one regret that dying people have isn’t that they didn’t make more money. It's not having spent more time with the people they loved.
If we’re lucky, we’ll think back to the many happy hours we spent with loved ones. To the times we created things of beauty, the hours we spent painting, singing or dancing.
If wanting to have a life filled with happy memories is lazy. I’m all for it. Find yourself a “lazy girl” job and focus your energy on what really matters.