'Lazy Girl Jobs' Won't Make Gen Z Less Anxious.

"Just when you thought Gen Z couldn't get more annoying, it has a new trend: Lazy Girl Jobs. According to a 20-something self-styled life coach on TikTok, this entails leaning into, no, not exciting and meaningful careers -- take that, Sheryl Sandberg -- but low-stress, mostly or completely remote jobs paying $60,000 to $80,000 so that you can enjoy lives of non-work-focused safety and comfort. She recommends looking for openings like "Marketing Associate" and "Customer Success Manager" and in one video declares (if one can declare anything in a monotone): "The whole point is for us to go live our lives and be amazing humans."

Bill and Ted, hold my beer.

As next-level as this trend feels, it doesn't surprise me. I get some of the most ambitious members of Gen Z in my classes at NYU's Stern School of Business. They are the 20-somethings who have bought into the system. The ones who are willing to admit they like work for work's sake and wouldn't object to two cars and a vacation home -- that is, of course, as long as their jobs benefit humanity along with shareholders.

My shiny, happy students share one important trait with Lazy Girl Job proponents. They worry a lot about anxiety. To be more specific, they worry a lot about feeling anxiety, and do everything they can not to.

Like Lazy Girl Job proponents -- and they are legion, with some videos approaching four million views -- many of my students often admit they have anxiety. In the old days, we might call this stress, but in the post-pandemic, rise-of-AI world, the free-floating "uh-oh" feeling we all have experienced has taken on new heft. It isn't fleeting, it's a way of life.

Physicians would put a finer point on it. There is anxiety, which is transitory, and there is anxiety disorder, which is a medical condition. But to my students, and much of Gen Z, this is splitting hairs. What they experience -- and hate experiencing -- is like a blanket draped over all their activities, from homework to dating, but mostly their job search, as you might expect with business students. In a New York Times interview, Yale University cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, who teaches the school's popular "happiness" course, officially called "The Science of Well-Being," said the pressure to achieve "destroys my students in terms of anxiety."

I am aware that anxiety disorder is real, and am probably one degree of separation from a dozen people who have needed medication or hospitalization because of it. You need only one phone call from a family member having a panic attack while racing to the emergency room to understand that anxiety, as a medical condition, isn't, as some critics of Gen Z would have it, just a bunch of snowflakes whining that it's cold out. It can be emotionally and physically devastating.

But when it comes to the anxiety I hear about most, the more garden variety, I admit that there have been times as both a professor and manager that I have wondered -- and I am not alone -- "Aren't these kids just dealing with adulthood, and adulthood is hard?" I have suggested to my students that perhaps this isn't anxiety but "paradox management" -- also known as making trade-offs. You want a promotion and a big house, but also want to spend your weekends fly-fishing, and a three-day weekend would be even better. You want to be a present parent, but need time to yourself every day, and going away one weekend a month would be divine. Ah, hard choices. These are, I'm afraid, what grown-ups make all the time. Because they are grown-ups.

Stymied, I took my questions to Jennifer Sotsky, at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine, a psychiatrist who specializes in Gen Z anxiety disorder. Recently she has been treating more Gen Z patients who want to free themselves from anxiety.

I asked if true anxiety disorder was on the rise, or if perhaps I was on to something with my "paradox management" framing. The answer was yes to both.

First, Dr. Sotsky said, more young people are experiencing anxiety, and even anxiety disorder, because -- please sit down -- well, because of us. Boomers, that is. As parents, we did everything to prevent our kids from feeling hardship or discomfort. We cleared every path and removed every obstacle. Or we tried. To wit: In 1977, when I called my mom from boarding school to tell her I had gotten into Harvard, she asked, "Sue, you applied?" In 2007, when my son applied early-decision to Stanford, I was literally leaning over him as he typed his essays. God forbid he know the agony of rejection!

I am, Dr. Sotsky said, the exact reason why Gen Z is terrified of anxiety: They have no experience with it. Indeed, she said, they have been taught anxiety is a harmful emotion rather than a beneficial one that, once navigated successfully a few times, motivates us to reflect and change. It turns out that with anxiety, she gently noted, "practice makes perfect."

She added, however, that I might not be wrong in suggesting that some of my students could benefit from thinking that their anxiety, if of the "stress" ilk, was the normal byproduct of making trade-offs in real life. In other words, of living.

And so, I will continue carefully suggesting to members of Generation Z that they not fear anxiety so much. It isn't their fault they're not better at managing it, and in fact, they may not even understand what it is.

But I will not -- no never, never -- get behind a trend that urges people to take nonjobs so they can be "amazing humans." As any truly amazing person will tell you, to become amazing, you have to get knocked around by life and even fall down and get up again. Those hard and decidedly unlazy experiences can be uncomfortable, and maybe make you feel anxious. But in the long run, and perhaps sooner, that's better than feeling bored.

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Ms. Welch is a professor of management practice at NYU's Stern School of Business and a senior adviser at the Brunswick Group." [1]

1. 'Lazy Girl Jobs' Won't Make Gen Z Less Anxious. Welch, Suzy. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 July 2023: A.17.