In the mid-2010s, I worked in a cafe in a south London art gallery. Every day I’d 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. And though I’ve had jobs more suited to my genuine interests since, that cafe job was one of my favourites, 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 emails.
Young women have taken to calling these sorts of jobs – as in, jobs that are undemanding but well enough paid, with little personal passion involved – “lazy girl jobs”. Mostly the term refers to menial office jobs as opposed to the service industry: people on computers, sending a few emails and taking home a comfortable salary. On TikTok, the #lazygirljob hashtag currently has about 14m views, and the mood is overwhelmingly aspirational. “I love my lazy girl job,” reads one post. “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 emails and keep everything clean,” reads another. The posters appear to be unanimously women – I’ve seen no evidence of a “lazy boy jobs” hashtag. Perhaps the concept of men being paid more to do less isn’t quite as novel or interesting. (Similarly, there’s 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 gen Z for quite some time now (see also: quiet quitting). These are the post-pandemic twentysomethings 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’s an emergent attitude broadly backed by stats: according to a survey from Workspace Technology, almost half of gen Z would leave a workplace if they weren’t given a “hybrid work option”. Meanwhile, just 49% of gen Z say work is central to their identity, in comparison with 62% of millennials. Plenty of #lazygirljob posts echo this sentiment: “Realising at this age that I don’t care about building a ‘career’ or climbing the corporate ladder,” reads one. “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’s 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, 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 prioritised over anything related to careers. People have jobs on screen, sure, but it’s no longer the central premise of our most beloved culture (bar, of course, Succession, although that’s hardly hustle propaganda). In a way, there’s 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 doesn’t want to fill out a few boring spreadsheets for a nice little pay package and holiday leave?). But they aren’t within reach of lot of people. There’s an inherent privilege in being able to land one of these jobs, which aren’t necessarily accessible to those who aren’t university-educated, for example, or easy for those who face workplace discrimination or recruitment bias.
But the fact that so-called lazy girl jobs have become aspirational is an interesting development. While it’s 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’re moving a little closer to something more like, “So, what do you do outside of work? What are you into?”
Daisy Jones is a writer, editor and author of All The Things She Said
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