An excellent article came out in praise of the “Soft Life” explaining why ‘millennials are quitting the rat race”.
While hard work once came with the promise of a home, a salary, progress and fulfilment, it’s increasingly obvious that social contract has been broken and that women are turning their backs on consumerism, materialism and burnout.
I see this in myself in the career leap I took in 2016 and in my clients who are creating new ways of working, living and leading.
They want to reclaim their sanity and create new pathways like the ‘Soft Life’. Shorter hours, less pressure, more time for relationships, time in nature and passion work even if unpaid. They want to liberate themselves from extractive systems that exploit humans and experience more freedom and fulfilment.
You might think that the ‘Soft Life’ is just for lazy people or those who can’t hack it. But…
“As Michelle Obama put it: ‘it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time’. Especially if you have the intersectional pressures that immigrants, queer women and women of colour have, too. The soft life is a logical reaction to a macro-level business model that suppresses the wages of society’s most vulnerable.”
Interestingly, I received a Cambridge alumni newsletter challenging the claim that Gen Z is lazier based on research. Every generation thinks the previous one is lazy!
The article concludes that the generational shift in commitment to ‘hard work’ is about a failure of organisations and employers to keep people motivated.
While the article names some important holes in the ‘lazy generation’ story, it omits the systemic one.
The elephant in the room is the eco-social crisis: it’s simply unfeasible for companies to keep growing and rely on workers to make products and then buy them to keep the economy going. Why? Because we have reached human and planetary boundaries that technology has not solved.
We can face the facts and come up with real solutions or continue on a dystopian path of chaos and collapse of democratic capitalism. I’ll keep writing and helping those who want a different way for as long as possible.
If you’re feeling lazy while trying your best, and starting to ask deeper questions about whether something else is possible, you’re not lazy, you’re liberating yourself.
