In the mid-2010s, I worked in a cafe in a south London art gallery. Every day I would make a few coffees, gossip idly with customers and then take home my little sack full of generous tips. It smelled nice in there, too: like baked bread and salty anchovies fresh from the tin.
Although I have had jobs more suited to my genuine interests since then, that cafe job was one of my favorites, mainly because of the pure leisure of it. I got paid more or less the same as I did later, as an editor at a major media publication, but I was relaxed, all of the time, and never checked my e-mails.
Young women have taken to calling these sorts of jobs — jobs that are undemanding, but paid well enough, with little personal passion involved — “lazy girl jobs.”
The term mainly refers to menial office jobs as opposed to the service industry: people on computers, sending a few e-mails and taking home a comfortable salary. On TikTok, the hastag #lazygirljob has about 14 million views, and the mood is overwhelmingly aspirational.
“I love my lazy girl job,” one post says. “I don’t have to talk to people, only come to the office twice a week.”
“Me at my lazy girl job that lets me do whatever the heck I want as long as I answer e-mails and keep everything clean,” another one reads.
The posters appear to be unanimously women — I have seen no evidence of a “lazy boy jobs” hashtag. Perhaps the concept of men being paid more to do less is not quite as novel or interesting. (Similarly, there is no male equivalent of the “girlboss” phenomenon.)
While the phrase “lazy girl job” might be relatively new, an anti-work, anti-ambition sentiment has been brewing among generation Z for quite some time now. These are the post-COVID-19 pandemic 20-somethings who spent their teens witnessing the rise and fall of the girlboss, and, disillusioned with hustle culture and the resultant burnout, would rather just take home a solid monthly wage and enjoy life within the parameters possible under capitalism.
At a time when creative industries are becoming next to impossible to enter for swathes of the working class, why not just focus on having an easy life, while finding meaning and life satisfaction outside of career stress?
It is an emergent attitude broadly backed by statistics. A survey from Workspace Technology showed that almost half of gen Z would leave a workplace if they were not given a “hybrid work option.” Meanwhile, just 49 percent of gen Z say work is central to their identity, in comparison with 62 percent of millennials.
Plenty of #lazygirljob posts echo this sentiment: “Realizing at this age that I don’t care about building a ‘career’ or climbing the corporate ladder,” one says. “All I want to do is make the most amount of money working the least amount of hours so I can spend the majority of my time with my family living life on my own terms instead of spending 40 years working for a boss who’s paying what they think is ‘fair.’”
Look closely, and it is a shift reflected in wider pop culture, too. Consider the films and TV shows that millennials were spoonfed growing up: Sex and the City, Ugly Betty, The Devil Wears Prada and Legally Blonde. These were stories about high-flying, stressed yet sexy women who dared to “have it all.” A decade or two later and the mood has substantially shifted.
Young people are more interested in shows such as Euphoria, The Last of Us and Sex Education, in which interpersonal dynamics are prioritized over anything related to careers. People have jobs on screen, sure, but it is no longer the central premise of our most beloved culture (bar, of course, Succession, although that is hardly hustle propaganda). In a way, there is something almost old-fashioned, even 1950s, about this approach to work: Jobs are for making money and supporting the home, while the real drama of life goes on around them.
Lazy girl jobs obviously have a certain appeal (who does not want to fill out a few boring spreadsheets for a nice little pay package and holiday leave?). However, they are not within reach of lot of people. There is an inherent privilege in being able to land one of these jobs, which are not necessarily accessible to those who are not university-educated, for example, or easy for those who face workplace discrimination or recruitment bias.
However, that so-called lazy girl jobs have become aspirational is an interesting development. While it is deeply depressing that making a living from our passions is becoming practically impossible for many people, any move away from our careers having to be our entire identity can only be a good thing. Or, at least, the better of two evils.
Indeed, the days of asking people: “So, what do you do?” might finally be over. Maybe we are moving a little closer to something more like: “So, what do you do outside of work? What are you into?”
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