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Uh oh, Michelle Obama has been advising gen Z on navigating work. “One thing that’s important is to learn how to do something you don’t like to do and be good at it,” she told the audience at a podcast recording in London. “Every experience – the bad boss, the boring assistant job, the job you thought that you weren’t appreciated, the one that didn’t give you the assignment you wanted when you wanted it – all of that is learning to be resilient.”
The podcast is called IMO, and she is entitled to her opinion, and it’s true that awful bosses, crap jobs and professional setbacks are inevitable, unpleasant learning experiences. Plus, Obama has navigated exceptionally tricky circumstances and put up with endless unjustified flak – she has plenty to teach everyone about grace under pressure. But there’s an implicit criticism of gen Z workers in her words. You see that a lot (they’re undisciplined! They won’t use the phone! They want mental health days!) and it feels unfair and unhelpful.
Obama is 62 and her career as an employee ended decades ago. She, I, and everyone over 40 came of age in an entirely different world of work. The few gen Zers lucky enough to find a “boring assistant job” in this atrocious market start out in echoingly empty, silent offices or their bedrooms, and AI is coming not just for their prospects, but for their support systems too. Business Insider recently reported that early studies on the social impact of AI on workplace cohesion show users reporting “lower trust in colleagues, weaker team coordination, higher burnout and greater feelings of isolation”. So where can gen Z workers get workplace wisdom, commiseration, laughs, the stuff that builds resilience, from?
Their social lives and educations were ripped apart by Covid; they’ve been neglected and let down by successive governments and their professional and economic futures look beyond murky. Advising gen Z on resilience based on our experiences is about as much use as telling them how to replace a typewriter ribbon. Surely the only sensible advice to offer a generation whose challenges are unrecognisable from the ones we faced is advice they actually ask for?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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