Long post warning. In case anyone rushes to comment the same before reading, yes this sucks as a term, yet here I am propagating it. Sorry. I am curious, however, of this community’s thoughts on the root cause(s) of the executive perception/PR campaign that many people don’t want to ‘work as much as they used to.’
Context: I will use ‘we’ to roughly mean ‘younger working people.’ I am a 26M fintech developer/consultant. My pay is certainly under market rate for the work I do, but it’s fine. The people and benefits are actually good, the work is sometimes moderately interesting, hours aren’t nutso, overall not a bad deal.
Personally, it is true that I don’t work as much as I used to (i.e. in school and early career). I’m really, really tired. The debilitating depression I’ve found little relief from over 10 years of treatment probably doesn’t help because nothing interests me, but neither does the unrelenting series of increasingly extreme and concerning events constantly unfolding around the world.
For you, is the limit on your work output more the result of a general hopelessness for the future of the world (‘why bother?’), disinterest in the work itself, incommensurately low pay with the work you’re asked to perform, bad people/management? Is it spite that we absolutely have the means to work less on the whole and experience more leisure, but the system we live in is not designed to allow that for most? Something else, or anyone who doesn’t feel this way?
Also: When, if ever, have you felt engaged with ‘work’, and what kept you from chasing that, if anything? My only memories there came out of a couple CS and music theory classes in college. Music theory didn’t make sense as a career, and I didn’t want to sit at a computer all day, yet that’s where I landed. CS in the real world is certainly interesting at times, but can come with a lot of baggage irrelevant and often counter to the actual exercise of studying and writing optimal and elegant code (more the domain of academic CS), so is usually less engaging for me.