In the early 2010s, I worked at a McDonald’s in Birmingham. For £3.76 an hour two days a week, I would scrub the toilets clean, throw endless amounts of rubbish and packages in the bin and stand at the drive thru window handing out orders no matter what the weather. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the most rewarding job. But straight out of school with the ink barely dry on my GCSE results it was something. It taught me patience, humility and that sometimes, sorry, the ice cream machine is working – but I just didn’t want to make it. Since that day, I’ve never stopped working and never not had an income. But what did change was the intensity of the jobs over time. From sweating over a hot grill to mid-morning walks and early finishes, long gone are the days of me bending over backwards for a job

So you can imagine my reaction when Jodie Foster, in a recent interview with The Guardian, called Gen Z “annoying in the workplace”. She said: “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”

This emergent attitude is everything that is wrong with how Millennials and Boomers treat those of us who are Gen Z. We’re not lazy, ignorant, or over-demanding, we just know how to work smarter with less the effort. 

The #Girlboss era that millennials and the likes of Emily Weiss and Sophia Amoruso championed in the mid 2010s is history: we’re not breaking our backs anymore to just to achieve the bare minimum or recognition in the workplace. The culture that Boomers and Millennials built, whereby we must hustle our way through life, struggling and eventually getting burned out doesn’t work for us Gen Z. Why? Because we’ve seen the results first-hand from our parents and co-workers who have become disillusioned with working culture. 

Looking at it closely, Millennials grew up on the likes of Sex and the City, Ugly Betty and Legally Blonde – all stories that champion high-flying females in the place of work. Overworked but sexy was the running theme in all these shows. Two decades later, Gen Z are engrossed with shows such as Euphoria, Baddies and Sex Education, shows that prioritise real life drama and societal issues. Sure they may have the odd scene of them working behind a coffee counter or baby-sitting, but that is no longer the focal point or the premise.

Our lives don’t revolve around work and gagging for the next promotion, the focus is about bettering ourselves and living life to the fullest – whether we have £0 in our account or £10,000. 

Call it ‘lazy girl’, ‘quiet quitting’ or ‘anti hustle culture’, us young people are no longer looking to the traditional ways to make money and live our lives. Witnessing the rise of social media in real time and almost being the guinea pigs for apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, we used this as an opportunity to seek other ways of making money. Influencing, drop-shipping, store fronts and UGC have become an easy way for us to make money, and we don’t even have to leave the comfort of our own bed. Commuting an hour to work to sit at a desk for eight hours of the day, making money for someone else, just to be paid 12 times a year isn’t what Gen Z signed up for, and Generation Alpha are riding this wave with us. 

This sense of entrepreneurship that we have installed in ourselves doesn’t take away from our work ethic, if anything we work harder – just not in the way Millennials want us to. Becoming a self-employed worker comes with its challenges: negotiating rates, legalities and of course taxes are all something that we must learn ourselves – and majority of us have to learn this while working a full-time job. According to research from EY, 40% of Gen Z have a side hustle because their salary isn’t enough to live off, and in this cost of living crisis, that rings true to me. We have to work smarter to in order survive this while protecting our mental health, we look for jobs that give us that freedom and flexibility to not only live our lives, but also fund our dreams and prospects. 

But to all my Millennials out there, I get it – you grew up in a workaholic society and you can’t quite break the shackles. But that doesn’t give you the right to shame Gen Z for our attitude towards office culture. We don’t have the work ethic problem, you do.