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When I open TikTok as a twentysomething-year-old working a nine-to-five, there’s a good chance I’ll find “5 to 9” videos showing variations of what a young professionals day looks likewhat my day should look like. I both love and hate them. CorporateTok is abound with what some professional Gen Z workers are up to from sunup to sundown. There are 5 a.m.-to-9 a.m. workouts, healthy breakfast smoothies, morning reading sessions, time-stamped work hours, and even full 6 a.m.-to-11 p.m. routines combining it all, from the morning workout to dinner with friends to end-of-night skincare regimens. This trend is seemingly in line with Gen Zs obsession with work-life balance. But in actuality, it could be counteracting the efforts Gen Z has put toward slowing down. They’re logging off of work just to log back on and see how productive everyone else is being. According to a Talker Research poll, burnout is happening earlier than ever, with Gen Z and millennial adults reporting an average high-stress age of 25, compared to the past peak burnout age of 42 for older generations. Gen Zers have become infamous for their insistence on work-life balance, whether through micro-retirements or in-office hookup spaces. The problem is, it may not be just work thats burning them out. A 2022 McKinsey study found that Gen Z is more negatively affected by social media than older generations. Gen Zers also report checking their social media more frequently than their older counterparts. More than a third (35%) say they spend more than two hours per day on social platforms; less than 25% of older generations say they spend more than two hours per day on social media. In particular, videos emulating the perfect corporate routine could be compounding the younger generations unprecedented rates of burnout and negative self-perception. Gen Z is living in a world of constant comparison to impossible standards. For some people . . . social media is showing them all these reminders that you need to be constantly working or grinding, says Angela Yuson Lee, a PhD candidate at Stanford University who studies Gen Z. Youre seeing that it’s not just that you could be this really amazing corporate boss, but you could also be a really beautiful and successful influencer, or you could be a really incredible athlete or bodybuilder, Lee adds. It’s like seeing the best and . . . the most impressive kinds of people in any given line of work being represented more on social media than you would see in the everyday world. The rise of the everyday influencer However, not everyone is buying into the ultra-productive five-to-nine routines that are being hyped up on TikTok. Some influencers are trying to find a middle ground. Chiara Lucia, 23, works a nine-to-five job in New York City. But in her free time, she is a content creator with 77.6K followers on TikTok and 4.27K on YouTube. Glitzy portrayals of PR events, high-end dinners, and endless Equinox classes rarely make an appearance in her videos. Instead, youll find videos like my 5 to 9, after my 9 to 5 and no spend days among her most popular content. She says most of it is inspired by her own desire to take a break from her traditional routine and maintain a creative outlet. My content became more about relatable content like working, being tired after work, and finding things to do, Lucia says. I feel like I have a big focus on once the work day is over, its time to reclaim the rest of my night and show how to make the most of the spare hours you get in the day. But even she isnt immune to the constant pressure of doing it all pressed upon her generation. It is really easy to get trapped into the New York lifestyle, and I’m sure in any big city it feels like I live in this big city, I have to take advantage of it, Lucia says. Like, why would I be sitting inside? But it’s not super attainable when you have a regular-paying or entry-level job and you’re tired. Consuming social media mindfully The constant access to others lives isnt going away anytime soon. Case in point: Lucias reaction to unsustainable five-to-nine videos was to create sustainable five-to-nine videos. Rather, it may just be on the digital natives themselves to understand how to stop the endless comparisons to influencers. Lucia says she manages this as an influencer by staying grounded and having a lot of friends who arent influencers. Lee says she likes to remind people to pay attention to how social media is making them feel. In her research, shes conducted focus groups with Gen Z teens talking about the trends they see. She notes that none of them are actually implementing the perfect skincare and workout routines being fed to them by influencer videos. She believes its important to have more conversations about media literacy to help audiences understand the difference between viral content and sustainable living habits. She compares these trends to Stanford Duck Syndrome. It’s the idea that you go to Stanford, walk around, and see that everyone’s happy because it’s sunny, and it looks like everyones doing all these cool things and they’re so amazing, Lee says. It looks like they’re just a duck gliding easily on the surface of the water, but if you look underneath, everyone’s paddling like crazy just like trying to keep up. Instead of trying to emulate the seemingly perfect, smooth-sailing lifestyles fed to them online, Gen Z might need to start looking below the surface.
Category:
E-Commerce
There are lots of reasons why employees end up with too much work. But regardless of the cause, heres how to push back if your workload is too great.
Category:
E-Commerce
Zombies have always fascinated me: one favorite is Brad Pitts World War Z, a fun movie of the genre with its brain-dead bodies wandering aimlessly through the world looking to feed off the living. But recent highly publicized research from MIT has left me wondering whether we are entering the land of the living dead as we head into the AI-powered workplace. The study, carried out by MIT Media Lab, focused on how the use of chatbots impacts our thinking. Using EEG brain scans, researchers found that when people relied on AI to write essays, their brain activity plummetedwith as much as 55% less activity in areas related to memory, creativity, and attention. But that’s not all: after pivoting away from the AI, users still underperformed in critical thinking and recall tasks. The research suggests, too, that this underperformance may heighten our risk for clinical depression and anxiety, Alzheimers disease, and dementia. The costs of AI to our critical thinking The adoption of AI chatbots has been a rapid revolution; ChatGPT, for example, set a record for the fastest-growing user base of any modern consumer application when it reached over 100 million users two months after launching in 2022. Since then, many doomsdayers have been predicting the demise of millions of jobs and the downgrading of humanity to no longer being the smartest in our universe. I believe in humanitys ability to change and adaptbut this research does raise some serious questions about the long-term impact for AI in organizations. If we encourage our people to adopt AI-first strategies into our business activities, we may be setting ourselves up for failure. In the short term, things may be getting done more efficiently and revenue may be up. But what about the cost to your corporate resilience and problem-solving? The collective cognitive cost is that we risk creating a workforce that appears busy, but is functionally brain-dead, unable to think for themselves, problem-solve, or be creative. In other words? Zombies. But there is still time to push back against the impending threat of corporate zombie-ism. Here are four things you can do to arm yourself against the invasion. Hone a reinvention mindset. Reinvention isnt easy, but its critical to be able to adapt to a fast-changing environment. This starts by reviewing your strengths and weaknesses. From there, you can make a conscious decision about what will serve you in the new world and what wont. Just like moving houses, you dont want to take all the junk with you. A reinvention mindset sees disruption as an opportunity, failure as a learning curve, and adaptability as a superpower. Empower your team. As AI becomes the new normal, your team will need to evolve their skills to identify and adapt to new opportunities. Training them to be AI-competent, while still encouraging the need for individuality and human-centric creativity and logic, will help maintain a healthy balance. Tough it out. Its through failing, learning, growing, and continuing on that we build deep knowledge, resilience, and pride in our efforts. Create guidelines for your workplaces use of AI, and reinforce that AI is merely a tool, rather than a complete solution. Have fun. During challenging times, increased stress and cortisol often restrict our ability to think logically and strategically. We are in survival mode. One of the best ways to address this is to release the pressure valve by having fun. Encourage the team to laugh, play, enjoy, and live in the moment. A shot of dopamine will reinforce the culture of reinvention that will always win over zombies. If a culture where zombies are accepted creates teams with a high AI-dependency and lowered critical thinking skills, then creating a reinvention mindset is the best path to long-term success. By focusing on our human qualities that make a culture unique and high performing, such as curiosity, resilience, and creative problem-solving, you will build a culture of reinvention that wont just survive in this changing world orderit will lead it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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