I can only laugh at Boomers that complain how hard their jobs were. Well that may have been the case – but they were slow. Nowadays they demand 120% from you all the time. Sure there are a lucky few that have jobs where they dont do much – but a vast majority of workers is simply overburdened with work.
I get around 100 Emails a day. When Im on vacation for one week (and I work a little during my vacation partly due to pressure partly because of the horror of how much work will be waiting for me when I return) I have around 500. Half of them require some work from me – its just too much.
And then the asshole bosses complain that you work either too slow or not diligent or not cheap enough.
You can do work diligent – fast – cheap – but you can only pick 2 of these at the same time. Bosses seem to ignore this little fact.
I have basically 30 to 40% more on my desk than one person can possibly manage. So I have to do work quick. Ofc its not dilligent and then the boss is angry at me.
Bitch if you want things done properly – you should not overburden people with too much work – its that easy. If you give too many tasks there will be some small mistakes.
If you would do your work thorough but because of that would do 1/3 less work – they would be equally angry anyways.
Work used to be slow and relaxed – now its just rushed and overburdening. Sure it was most likely harder – but since there was less time pressure it was less stressful.
Emails and Teams messages are truly the bane of the office worker because its 100x easier and quicker to give them something to do than 50 years ago when a phone call or in person was the only possible way to relay tasks.
For Blue collar workers work may be less hard due to machines – but they are also expected to do 2-3x more work than when Boomers were the same age.
Im close to burnout – and I believe most of the population is. One statistic I found claims that between 2004 and 2021 the rate of Burnout sick leave in the workplace increased 10x. Compared to 1970 it then must be around 30 fold.