from Hacker News

Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety

by nikole9696 on 12/11/23, 6:12 PM with 35 comments

• by Casteil on 12/11/23, 6:40 PM

  Perhaps a better title for this article would be: "Business leaders are bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety"

  With the popularity of 'hot desking', overbearing micromanagement, unrealistic expectations, and continuous surveillance/activity monitoring.. who can blame people for being stressed / anxious at work?

• by apercu on 12/11/23, 8:57 PM

  It feels like "progress" and "change" are glacial. I'm about to turn 50. I have been in tech since I was 23.

  When I first entered the workforce there were more people doing the same amount of work than happens today. From 93-2000 I watched tons of companies lay off staff and spread the work to the remaining people. Then the same thing happened in 2008-10. Then the same thing happened over the last 5 years.

  The new normal (because of the decades of change):

  No one has time or space to focus, everyone is asked to do too much. So no one has time to do quality work so we feel like our work is shitty and we can't take pride in our work - yet we spend most of our waking hours hours doing that work. Which impacts our quality of life and increases our stress levels.

  Maybe that's why everyone is anxious.

• by crmd on 12/11/23, 8:02 PM

  I don’t believe my gen z colleagues have more anxiety than my gen x colleagues. However they are socialized to talk about it more, and possibly to sometimes medicalize ordinary emotional experiences. I think it’s good we’re talking about it.

• by kelseyfrog on 12/11/23, 7:30 PM

  There is a contradiction in the intersection of "bring your whole self to work"-type organizations and "except that"[this article].

  At the root of this is emotional alienation - the fundamental realization that workers are a means to an end, a class of people divorced from one of the core ideas of what makes people human - emotion.

  When displaying emotions makes management uncomfortable, I see a great opportunity to dig in and start with five whys. Equally possible, could management simply not experience discomfort?

• by seydor on 12/11/23, 6:23 PM

  if you can't do anything without being surveilled, are constanlty compared, and publicly shamed on worldwide media, guess what you may get.

  I don't know what's holding people back from starting the talk about public health effects of the new online 'cigarettes'

• by happymellon on 12/11/23, 8:41 PM

  > Jeff, we have no news to publish today. What can we put out there?

  I have an article about how Gen X is making the workplace too emotional.

  > You can't publish that, Gen X is in their 50's and 60's

  I have an updated revision that says that Millennials are bringing emotions and anxiety in to the workplace?

  > Millennials are in their 40's Jeff, you can't publish that.

  Let me find/replace it with Gen Z so we can attack the new generation who have been entering the workforce for a decade now.

  > Perfect.

• by macinjosh on 12/11/23, 6:43 PM

  I see Gen Z is starting to receive the same treatment Millennials received from the media as they entered adult hood.

  I remember when we were blamed for killing Applebees, LMFAO, good riddance.

  Basically this is old people complaining about change. I get it, I am getting old and it sucks. But being the green horn sucks too!

• by jess-desu on 12/11/23, 8:13 PM

  When I have difficulty assessing tone in an e-mail or chain of messages, I ask ChatGPT to help interpret for me. So far, it's been a helpful neutral party and does help me to step back from my own reaction and consider a perspective I hadn't thought of before. That said, it's also been pretty accurate at picking out "overly aggressive" or condescending tone.

• by zcw100 on 12/12/23, 2:36 PM

  There is a huge selection bias. Gen Z being the latest entrant is going to have people who are anxious and not well equipped for the environment who will move to other careers. These types of people will not be represented in older cohorts because they have already moved on.

• by grrandalf on 12/11/23, 9:55 PM

  the kids are alright

  (GenX'er fwiw)

• by polski-g on 12/11/23, 6:55 PM

  We need to be aggressively removing microplastics from the supply chain. They act as hormone replacements (1) resulting in declining testosterone levels (2), which in turn results in higher levels of neuroticism (3).

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33916482/

  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32081788/

  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28214680/