No One Wants To Work Anymore!
By V MURDAYA ‘27 and LEON XIE ‘27
Complaining about work has always been a universal pastime for every working member of society. Though it might not be as loved as nights out with friends or vacations, there’s never been a shortage of gripes regarding the labor in daily life. In recent years, however, the attitude towards work has undergone a subtle change. The atmosphere in casual conversation and the workplace is now perpetually lined with an undertone of exhaustion. Social media is also often flooded with posts and tweets involving the burnout and pressure of “hustle culture”, while topics in casual conversations among friends often lead to complaints about workplace stress and exhaustion. While the growing reluctance to work might not pose a detrimental impact towards society, it still represents a paradigm shift. Chiefly, this reduction in work enthusiasm could be attributed to the recent global pandemic which caused virtually everyone to be stranded in their homes, as well as the trend of social media viewership increasingly favoring short form content.
When COVID-19 initially emerged as a threat to global health, killing hundreds of thousands and infecting millions more, a tidal wave of lockdowns and quarantines swept the earth in a matter of weeks. Students and working adults were forced to head home to continue their jobs or education online, which challenged the productivity of many through the numerous distractions at home and the difficulty of maintaining a conducive work-life balance. Furthermore, within the strife of the pandemic, there was also a tinge of guilty relief that school or work could be put on hold for a couple weeks. But weeks turned to months, and months became almost two full years of separation from the outside world. Apps like Zoom took off as people tried to resume learning or working. The solution, however, was imperfect. People found out they could get away with more without supervision to keep them in check. For students, a difficult question could be reduced to a Google search, and all it took was switching their camera off for working adults to get in a quick nap during a meeting. Even the most willful individuals eventually succumbed to the sleepy, laid-back rhythm of jobs and school behind the doors COVID had closed. By the time social distancing was ready to be phased out, this lack of responsibility had become the status quo. Even now, about two years after the world was purported to have resumed normal function, the effects of the lockdowns can still be felt. People may not find themselves wishing for their work or school schedules during COVID, but the memory of how relaxed everything was when working or learning from home hasn’t made mustering up the motivation to get down to business any easier.
Another invention that is in the running for having the greatest impact on today’s world is that of short-form content. Content creation apps, such as YouTube, were already flourishing before the pandemic because of the ubiquity of our desire to exchange ideas and experiences with one another. However, COVID-19 drastically increased the amount of screen time that every person consumes. When people were left with an unprecedented abundance of free time, social media found a cornucopia of empty space in people’s days to be filled. TikTok, a moderately well-known Chinese app centered around posting short videos, gained over eight hundred million users from 2020 to 2021 and became a household name. It now has one billion active monthly users and over half the United States has an account. Snapchat and Instagram integrated their own short video platforms to compete, forming the “Big Three” of short-form content. It’s safe to say that when the average American spends over 80 minutes on an app daily, it’ll have a profound effect on their psychology.
Short-form content differs from previous social media mediums in that it’s a video that’s only 10 seconds to a minute long. In the rushed, tightly scheduled lives of people in the 21st century, it’s a genius marketing strategy: fill in the gaps between blocks of time like mortar by feeding people bite-sized videos. Now, short-form content has been implemented in all social media apps, even those centered around messaging, such as Facebook. As harmless as this pivot towards shorter duration videos, and the several seconds of reduced attention span that this may cause, this would result in a drop in peoples’ productivity. Mainly, short form videos enable many to achieve instant gratification by consuming an immeasurable amount of content. As a result social media has effectively made us all dopamine-seeking junkies. Thus, it is no surprise that it has become significantly harder to complete more laborious tasks that are both time consuming and physically demanding, due to us being less willing to put in the effort required to do so. This encompasses both studying for exams as a student and completing arduous tasks at the workplace. Why spend all that effort to finish your English essay when you could receive the same feeling of satisfaction by flicking your finger on a screen?
As a whole, the prevailing work ethic, caused by a combination of excessive social media use and the recent pandemic, are prevalent among both educational facilities and workplace environments, and echo Kim Kardashian’s words. In the quest to find a new normal amid this decline in work productivity, it is unclear whether this trend will persist, or perhaps, both students and working adults would be able to rebound to pre-covid and social media levels. Furthermore, every business endeavor is aimed at getting the most out of its clients, and now that personal data has become a valuable commodity, the primary goal of social media platforms is to keep their users plugged in for as long as possible. Short form content is one main method. By inserting advertisements in between these snippets of content, numerous digital brands and businesses are able to profit off of our social media addictions. Therefore, on their end, these media conglomerates are not incentivized to increase our productivity by sacrificing their bottom line. It is up to us, as digital consumers, to ensure that we do not climb deeper into this hole of work unproductivity.