The Gen Z Employment Crisis (Part 3) – Incompatible

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Imagine you were born right at the end of World War II. Within the first decade of your life music shifted from jazz and swing to rock and roll. Instead of listening to a radio program or going to the movies, you could watch a sitcom on a small television screen right from the comfort of your living room.

Just as you entered adulthood, the country was embroiled in a series of contentious political issues. The president was assassinated, an unfavorable war was raging in Vietnam, and peaceful protestors were marching on the streets of Selma, Alabama in an effort to bring an end to decades of racial segregation.

When you reached your 30s and were just getting settled into life, the economic boom of the post war period had finally come to an end. Oil shortages meant long gas lines and high government spending to fund the war and new social programs at home led to rampant inflation.

By the time you retired in the early 2010s, the world looked nothing like it did just a few decades prior. You could communicate with anyone anywhere on the planet in an instant, everyone had a smartphone in their pocket, and a new form of media – social media – was all the rage with your grandkids.

Now consolidate all of this change into just a few years. This is the upheaval Gen Zers are facing right now. Change is happening at lightning speed. Gen Z is struggling to keep up.

Anytime there is a technological change, social and cultural change follows. These changes often establish new social hierarchies and cultural norms that reflect changing economic conditions that result from technological advancement.

In the past, change was decades in the making. It took time for news of what was fashionable in New York to find its way to Chicago or San Francisco. The proliferation of mass consumerism and new forms of media in the post-war period enabled change to happen at a far faster rate. Images could be broadcast into American homes and affordable products stocked department store shelves, enabling middle class households to create their own form of high society.

Now change is happening faster than today’s young people can keep up. Zoomers are the first digitally native generation to exist. They don’t know the world before smartphones and social media. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Gen Z is developing a distinct culture that is incompatible with the culture of the generations that preceded it.

This is a problem when it comes to work. Even though Gen Z is experiencing record high underemployment, they’re not necessarily helping themselves either.

Gen Z is addicted to social media. They lack critical social skills, hindering their ability to function in day-to-day life. Their expectations of what the world should be are far divorced from reality. They’ve created a reputation for themselves that makes employing them a liability rather than an asset.

But this cultural shift is more significant than a handful of individual preferences. Gen Z culture is incompatible with the modern workplace. Even if there is a work opportunity that’s suitable for a Gen Zer, more and more employers don’t want to take a risk on them.

There are legitimate structural problems undermining Gen Z when it comes to work. But we can’t overlook the cultural shift that is happening at the same time. Intergenerational conflict over what is expected of workers and incompatible political ideologies may be leaving Gen Zers on the sidelines — even the ones who want to work hard.

Colleges are sending political advocates into the workforce. The ideologies recent grads bring to the office are incompatible with the expectations of their employers.

Two weeks ago, a group of students stormed Butler Library at Columbia University to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Around 80 students were arrested.

This isn’t the first time students at Columbia have protested the issue, nor will it be the last.

Protests have been raging at university campuses across the country since 2023. While many of these protests rightfully condemn Israel’s heavy-handed tactics against civilians in Gaza, the protests may have gone too far. Many of the students attending these protests don’t even know what they’re even fighting for.

This represents a larger cultural shift that’s happening within Gen Z. Ideology has become as tangible and omnipresent in their lives as religion. The things they’re learning in college aren’t just theories to be discussed in a lecture hall. They’re ideas that are treated as gospel truth. And because of that these students are engaging in a type of political activism that is incompatible with the world of work.

A decade ago, I was one of these protestors. Well, sort of.

I entered my freshman year as an international relations major with a focus on the Middle East. When I graduated I had completed majors in international relations, political science, history, and a minor in Middle Eastern studies.

Somewhere in those four years I learned about Palestine. I became obsessed with it. I wrote my senior thesis advocating for Palestinian statehood. I traveled to Israel and the West Bank multiple times to do research. And this is what I put on my cap when I walked across the stage to accept my diploma at graduation.¹

This is my actual graduation cap that I made for my graduation in 2013.

Today, I’m no longer an impressionable college student. But I’m watching what’s happening on college campuses and I’m beginning to doubt the veracity of my own thoughts.

How did I, a white Christian girl from Upstate New York with no connection to the Middle East, become a pro-Palestinian advocate? Where did that come from?

I’m not consciously aware of my professors indoctrinating me. In fact, my thesis advisor lived in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces. But it’s clear to me something is happening on college campuses.

College has always been a hotbed of student protest. But they’ve always protested something tangible that directly affected their lives like the Vietnam War. College students today aren’t necessarily protesting a thing that’s based in reality. They’re protesting ideas based on a worldview that I’m not certain is their own.

I highlight Palestine because this is something I am intimately familiar with. But it isn’t just Palestine. Marxism, critical race theory, and feminism are other examples of ideologies young adults are taking action on. Watch Peter Boghossian’s Spectrum Street Epistemology series on YouTube to see what I mean.

Young people today are wedded to ideologies they don’t quite understand and are taking those ideologies with them into the workforce.

That’s why we’re seeing more and more of these ideologies pop up in culture. It’s not an accident that every show now has one – if not several – gay characters that feel forced and plot lines that celebrate strong independent women without requiring them to overcome any sort of trial or adversity.

While there are jobs where it makes sense to advocate for these ideologies, corporate executives are beginning to recognize they do more harm than good. Young people are becoming liabilities rather than assets to their employers. With AI on the horizon, why take the risk in hiring someone who wants to disrupt your business?

Ideological advocacy is costing employers. They’re reluctant to hire young people who might do more harm than good.

To understand how employers are approaching the current cultural zeitgeist, look no further than Bud Light’s ill-fated partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.

In 2022, AB InBev, the parent company of Bud Light, promoted a Millennial feminist to take the helm of marketing Bud Light. Less than eight months into the job, she decided to literally make Dylan Mulvaney the face of Bud Light. By trying to be more “inclusive” – a fundamental pillar of Gen Z ideology and expectations in the workforce – this woman drove the brand into the ground.

In a now viral social media post, Mulvaney, dressed in costume styling themself after Audrey Hepburn, showed off a custom can Bud Light made for Mulvaney to celebrate their 365th day of promoting womanhood on social media.

Before the Mulvaney incident, Bud Light was America’s top selling beer. The ideological disposition of a single person tanked the brand. It alienated their base – young guys interested in sports, country music, and cheap beer for fraternity parties – and a boycott followed. Bud Light lost an estimated $1.4 billion as a result.

While this is one example of how ideologies are finding their ways into American companies, this isn’t the only one. Disney’s remake of Snow White took a $115 million loss after the beloved fairy tale was rewritten to accommodate a more modern feminist audience, represented by the movie’s Gen Z star, Rachel Zegler.

Even pro athletes can’t show up and play ball without acknowledging that their talent somehow has something to do with a racial privilege.

Gen Zers are developing beliefs in college that they take into the workforce after they graduate.² These beliefs reinforce a new corporate culture that has emerged, demanding companies be diverse, equitable, and inclusive. But these beliefs have real consequences. After a few years of experimenting with DEI and ESG, companies are starting to push back. They’re not just losing revenue, they’re alienating customers and fans who are exhausted from everything in their lives being politicized.

Unfortunately, employers are taking note and Gen Z is caught in the crosshairs. They don’t want to hire advocates of political causes who are going to be a PITA for HR or cost the company business. They want workers who will show up, do their job, and do it well.

Put simply: Gen Z has become too risky to hire. A survey reported in Inc. found a growing number of employers would be reluctant to hire someone who’s been participating in campus protests:

While many companies report having a harder time finding qualified job candidates than before the pandemic, a recent survey found considerable wariness among hiring managers to offering positions to recent Gen Z college grads. The poll by Intelligent.com, a higher education advisory company, showed respondents gave a variety of reasons for those hesitations, with perhaps the most surprising being a candidate’s past participation in controversial pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Fully 30 percent of bosses said they’d be concerned with a job applicant’s activities during those protests, with 22 percent saying they were “reluctant to hire graduates who participated.”

While the article attributes this to the political dimension of campus protests, I think it’s also because of the culture that has emerged within Gen Z. They’re spending too much time advocating for ideas — many of them doing so on social media — and not enough time doing real work.

What happens when an employer asks a young person to help a client who offends them or complete a task they don’t want to do? Are they going to barricade themselves in a boardroom and demand change?

If the backlash over Starbucks’ recent uniform announcement is any indicator, that’s not hyperbole. That probably would happen.

Gen Z has become a liability for employers and it’s an unfortunate consequence of when they came of age. In much the same way their grandparents benefitted from the good fortune of being born in the post-war boom, Gen Z is plagued by the misfortune of coming of age in a culture where political ideologies are running rampant and where social media has become more real than reality itself. Even Gen Zers who aren’t participating in protests or advocating for political causes have to bear the consequences of the culture their generation has created.

Once Gen Z is in the workforce, they can’t work. This reinforces their belief in oppression and resentment of world of work.

The first part of this series established that structural changes in the economy pushed young people into college making their degrees common and thus less valuable than they used to be. The second part argued that rapid AI adoption is making Gen Z’s ascension into the workforce unnecessary and thus obsolete.

This third installment argues that in the process of going through the college-career pipeline, young people are developing a new culture that is incongruous with the world of work. Gen Z political advocates are a liability but so too is their dependence on social media.

I started this essay off with the political ideologies shaping Gen Z because Gen Z is using those ideologies to seek accommodations, preferences, and privileges that are reshaping work itself. Within those accommodations rests the actual problem Gen Z is grappling with: social media addiction, emotional manipulation, and a complete disconnect from reality.

Take time blindness as an example. A young woman went viral on TikTok a few years ago after lamenting how unfair it was that an employer was unwilling to provide her with accommodations for her time blindness:

@chaotic_philosopher2I'm tired of workers' rights not being prioritized in this country. And we're entitled for suggesting it should be different... I don't think so. #workersrights #employeerights #workers #capitalismsucks #capitalism #thesystemisbroken #fyp

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The employer responded that time blindness isn’t real. The young woman concluded her video by suggesting a work culture that doesn’t accommodate every individual’s needs should be dismantled, further reinforcing what I said above about the liability Gen Zers pose to their employers.

While there’s certainly an argument to be made about whether or not the 9to5 system still makes sense, young people also need to be responsible. If your employer expects you to be at your desk at 9:00 AM then you need to do whatever you need to do to make sure that happens.

But while the idea of time blindness is asinine, I think it reveals a disturbing trend about the relationship between technology and culture and how that is impacting Gen Z’s ability to find work.

Time blindness is a symptom of ADHD. According to the Attention Deficit Disorder Association, time blindness is defined as:

Time blindness in adult ADHD is the inability to sense how much time has passed and estimate the time needed to get something done. It isn’t an official diagnosis, but it can significantly impact your daily life. Time blindness changes how you prioritize tasks, allocate time, and manage your schedule.

Time blindness is a legitimate issue for people with ADHD. It’s not the intentional act of disregarding time or disrespecting someone else’s time.

ADHD is a growing problem that may itself be a symptom of social media usage. 42% of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the most common of which is ADHD. Separately, a 2022 study found that there is a correlation between ADHD and social media usage.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put the pieces together. Young people are heavy users of social media. Gen Z spends upwards of seven hours a day consuming content online. Their use of social media creates a negative feedback loop that increases their likelihood of developing ADHD and anxiety.

New ideas are rapidly transmitted through social media. They want to belong and are in a vulnerable mental state. They’re following the herd, adopting ideologies and beliefs they don’t fully understand. Ideological fervor and ADHD are symptoms of a new culture that has emerged and that culture doesn’t mesh with the incumbent culture.

Gen Z is struggling. They want to work but I’m not confident that they can. They expect accommodations that their employers are unwilling to give them. Because of that, they retreat further into the safety of the ideologies that resist the oppressive systems they learned about in college. They look to social media for support without realizing that that may actually be the source of most of their problems. It’s far easier to blame other people for your problems and project your feelings into the digital ether than it is to take ownership of them for yourself.

I don’t fault Gen Z for what’s happened to them. In much the same way I didn’t ask for participation trophies as a kid, they didn’t ask to be handed an iPhone at 10 years old.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened. They are part of a digitally native culture that interferes with their ability to work. The world is changing but it hasn’t fully changed just yet. If Gen Z wants to work, they have to figure it out how to navigate the social and cultural norms as they are right now.

This cultural dynamic of Gen Z at work is overlooked but it’s fundamental to understanding why Gen Z is out of work and why they’re not going to find work anytime soon.

The emergence of new technologies over the last two decades and the change in culture that has emerged alongside those technologies has sown the seeds of intergenerational conflict. The expectations of employers – largely companies run by Boomers and older Gen Xers – is incompatible with the expectations of young people entering the workforce.

Employers are increasingly hesitant to take a risk on Gen Z. And Gen Z, handicapped by technology, has a reduced capacity to work in the first place. Whatever happens won’t be enough to bridge the gap. Boomers will see Gen Z as weak and hostile while Gen Zers will see their Boomer employers as oppressors.

I don’t think there’s a way to reconcile these differences. Neither side has sufficient context to understand where the other is coming from.

Regardless of whose side you’re on — if you’re on a side at all — this is going to escalate in the coming decade as more Gen Zers enter the workforce and fall short of having their expectations met.

Boomers will need Gen Z to meet their needs in retirement for the current social contract to continue. But even if Gen Z could rise to the occasion, it’s unclear that they would be willing to do so.

It’s not just about Gen Z being out of work. It’s about how their existence outside the world of work will shape the new social contract that emerges in the years to come.

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1. This is supposed to say “freedom” but my Arabic wasn’t very good at the time. It should have read حرية not هرية.

2. I do want to be fair here that this isn’t just Gen Z. There’s also an effort at the top, led by private equity and asset management firms to implement ESG and DEI policies. These policies, however, need people to carry them out, and unfortunately, Gen Z and Millennials have been cast in the role to do the bidding of the powers that be.

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