Quarter of Gen Zs consider quitting work as young Brits cite mental health as key reason to go unemployed

“It comes as the number of Brits not seeking work or not available to work due to health conditions hit 9.4 million last year, about 22% of working-age adults.”

That’s a shocking figure.

A quarter of Gen Z better get used to having fuck all then. I don’t think they understand what life on benefits is like. It’s easy, but it’s boring.

“GenZ know their boundaries and are standing up to asshole bosses” – Fixed it for you

For most people, working is not rewarding enough I.e. not able to afford a house of their own, or to support a family and have time for hobbies, etc… Why work to survive? I think this is why the benefit cuts are coming in – so you either work or starve. (My point here is that rather than working towards improving the salaries and reducing cost of living, the government is focused on cutting down unemployment benefits)

Whaaaaat? You mean paying them peanuts, locking them out the housing market, saturating them with algorithm driven social media, making human relationships almost unattainable, and threatening them with WWIII, isn’t making them mentally healthy?

Well, fuck me.

It’s almost as if capitalism is on its last legs and people are realising you need to be a complete muppet to work yourself to the bone for a living when the asset class chill out and enjoy the good life with the fruits of your labour…

I can’t blame them.

These youngsters have studied for their entire life under the premise that it will get them a good job when they finish their studies. They finish uni and end up on barely over minimum wage.

Also I think the nature of work now is depressing. Most people work in soulless offices with a lack of collaboration. It’s a competitive corporate environment. No wonder people are not happy. I work in an industrial environment it’s long hours, it’s hot and it can be hard work but I’d rather do that than work in an office. I’d definitely quit within a week if I was forced to work in an office.

We also have an economy that doesn’t benefit the average person. All this talk of “economic growth” but who is the economy growing for? Why should the average person be bothered about growing the economy when they have no stake in the economy?

I tend to agree as a millennial. Even I, someone earning in mid 40K’s, cheap rent, no dependants or girlfriend, and reasonable prospects cant kick the feeling of “what is the point”. I think the days of getting ahead through hard work are dead, like it has become all stick and no carrot.

My feeling is that things will have to break before they will mend.

If people had decent wages and course progression in their lives with achievable goals I bet this figure would be a lot lower

Anyone with an attitude of “lazy gen z” or “work sucks but I still go, so should you” are missing the forest for the trees.

Give people a reason to want to work beyond just weaponising the DWP against them, and you might just find that fewer people are crashing out of the workforce due to burnout and stress.

Social cohesion has broken down, public services are barely functioning, wealth inequality is absurd and the social mobility ladder has been pulled up, most employers have cut roles so most people are doing the work of three people for pay that falls year-on-year, mental healthcare in the UK has been so badly degraded that it now consists of SSRIs and 6 sessions of extremely basic ‘one size fits all’ CBT over the phone.  

Why is this a shock?

Unemployment benefits were created to stop people from starving to death, and in the early days people felt ashamed of needing them.

Nowadays unemployment has become a lifestyle choice. We can’t keep doing this.

Most of it is because for many there is no point the social contract is broken

The promise of work wasn’t just money for moneys sake it was the promise to one day own a home, start a family, build a nest egg and retire to enjoy it

Most will never afford a home or a family or build a nest egg or even retire so what is the point of work ?

If the Uk wants to solve its mental health crisis it would be best served dismantling the nihilistic dystopian system of working just to pay rent and tread water

But then its politically easier to just cut benefits and claim mental health issues don’t exist that actually fix the problem

For me, working is completely pointless. As a business owner, if I go over £12k/year i get taxed at about 50%.

Even if i went mental and tried to maximise my business, affording a house in my area is financially impossible even on a 1%er salary. Instead I earn just the bare minimum and spend the rest of the time travelling and wildcamping and hitchiking. Been to over 50 countries. Walked thousands of miles. I repair my own clothes, grow my own food, hunt and forage. I also dumpster dive waitrose and eat better than a middle class person.

Some people will call me all sorts of unpleasent names, but i’m just rationally obeying capitalism and I’d rather be a tramp than a slave.

Society made it clear I am disposable to it, so I disposed of society.

I absolutely agree that it would be so much easier to just chill at home doing sweet fa, but it’s the doing sweet fa part that would lead to me having mental health problems.

Working pays my bills and gives me extra to spend on myself, keeps me fit, gives me a sense of purpose, and a sense of achievement after completing a hard day.

Maybe they are all sick of beings cogs in a machine working to make others rich, difference is they’re learning early on they are nothing more than working slaves that can barely afford to raise families or own anything.

Work used to carry basic rewards. There was a social contract.

Get a job and you could afford your first car, save up for a deposit on your first house or flat, get married, start a family, after which you were locked in. You had spending power, you could go on one or two big holidays a year, you had easy access to GP surgeries, dentists, nearby school placements. All of this used to happen by the time you were 25.

For the past 22 years, this hasn’t been the case. Young people haven’t been able to afford to buy a house or flat. We have millennials coming up to 40 who are locked into paying over half their monthly salary (sometimes more) to a private landlord who won’t let their tenants redecorate, won’t let them have pets and won’t accept tenants with children. They’ve deferred having children because they’re either locked into this system or they can’t afford to live by themselves so still have random housemates into their 30s. Most of them have been stuck on zero hour contracts, no promotions, seasonal work, temp jobs, etc, etc. They’re saddled with student debt and any wage increases they’ve seen in the last decade have been wiped out by the increasing cost-of-living crisis.

Gen Z have seen the joyless efforts of millennials to try and live the same quality of life as boomers and gen-x and they’re opting out. They have to live in a world where talk of WWIII is constant, where shitty people get rewarded, both across social media, and increasingly across politics and mainstream media. They’ve seen good people who inspired them treated like dog shit for wanting people to have a better life with better opportunities. They live in a compartmentalized world where artificial intelligence is likely going to replace them and where the threat of climate disaster means the future and survival is an uncertainty for them.

It’s no wonder they don’t feel motivated. The system failed millennials and it fundamentally doesn’t work for Gen Z – so why should Gen Z work for the system?

Im a young millennial ’29’ have a STEM PhD, 2 year contract ends in about a year, it’s 2 to stop me getting lots of normal statutory benefits and am really considering just giving up and living with my parents on benefits. I’ve done everything we were told, get educated, very healthy, save, invest etc. Im in a good situation compared to most but I’ll never afford house in an area that supports the high skilled job I was trained for (biophysics – expensive equipment only really supported in expensive cities) and ill never be able to afford a family. Equally ive gone on to see peoplen who were academically worse succeed because they had family connections. Genuinely, what’s the point. And I’m doing ‘well’. Things are only going to get worse. My nephew wants to be a scientist like me and I’m depressed to say, don’t bother. Constant house price appreciation has been a national disaster. And they still say don’t worry you’ll inherit it at some point. Well because of health care i won’t inherit shit till I’m probably 60 or 70. Is that when I’ll have enough to actually start my life?!

It’s definitely a confluence of factors

Work doesn’t pay anymore or fulfil the social contract. Unless you are in the top earning households (either as an individual or a couple), Gen Z just aren’t going to own their own house. Which both means higher rent (due to no rent control versus mortgage) and no equity building over time.

At the same time, pay increases both massively lags inflation AND the gap between minimum and median wage has decreased significantly. What this means is that hard work doesn’t pay, you could just do the lowest paid job and only get a bit less. Obviously, there is a floor to how much you need to survive, but there’s a very big question whether you should kill yourself to work hard for only a bit extra versus phoning it on (usually) easier and less stressful min wage jobs.

The last layer in this shit sandwich is the benefit system. I will use my sister as an example, she’s a single mum (with no child support) and a 20ish hour per week teaching assistant with one kid. She had her rent paid previously and now owns 25% of her house with UC paying the other 75% (so some small equity build). She does not have a comfortable life by any means, no savings and relies on my parents a bit too much, but she has a new build house, a car etc. However, the cliff edge of benefits means she would need to more than double her gross salary to even break even, as any pay increase she gets would remove the rent subsidy, her UC payments etc.

I’m not advocating for that to actually happen (cut benefits, hurr durr) as that would be a net social negative (how exactly does she more than double her hours as a teaching assistant even schools don’t work overnight, and she’s not exactly going to become an investment banker with retraining), but it shows the benefit trap that a lot of people are in – earn too little to live well, but there’s no realistic prospect of earning enough to even try to escape it.

And even if an individual somehow can, the majority simply will never be able to as there always has to be a below average earner due to basic maths. There has to be a basic floor for an individual to afford basic needs (food, rent, bit extra to survive) and if a min wage job cannot provide that, the state needs to step in to either make the min wage a min living wage or with benefits. And that probably advantages single people or one person working household (rent is a fixed cost, food and utilities aren’t exactly linear per person etc), so it probably means the latter (it wouldn’t be fair to make companies pay single people more and it would definitely lead to discrimination)

We can all moan and whine about inflation, high labour costs, etc and how things are different, but we can also look at what works well in Europe to copy – I live in NL now and things are far from perfect (our housing market is even more fucked than the UK, especially the rental sector), but wages are a lot better especially in white collar jobs, and it’s an attractive business destination for companies, the UK has bought into low wages and low taxes being their competitive advantage, whereas that’s far from true in a well regulated economy. One of the reasons I came is because my salary jumped 25% for the same kind of work (before the tax break I didn’t know about) and I would struggle to move back to the UK without a significant pay cut (and prices that are now mostly comparatively higher than they were when I first moved, so a double hit, UK used to be cheaper for food and housing after exchange rate, now it’s roughly parity)

I have tried to explain this to several older friends

There is no reason for Gen-Z to work

For most of them you will never be able to own a home or even a car.

You give up 8 hours a day and take home enough to buy yourself some small luxuries. You still won’t be able to afford to actively improve your life experience

You could instead just stop working, bed rot in your mothers house and have basically the same level of life comfort, only without giving up 50% of your waking life

All generations prior if you put effort in you would reach a higher level of comfort and progress in life. House, car, holidays, fancy tv etc

By the time it reached the younger millennials it was very difficult to buy a house even with two full salaries

For Gen-Z it is basically impossible

So some will peddle away at the mill in the hope that they will progress in life, but some (around 25% based on current not seeking work figures) will say meh, I got a 4 year old phone and a bed to lay on.

That is an unsustainable level and it is growing as the price of housing accelerates away from all reason

The bulk of the last decade it was impossible to save for a deposit as the house prices were increasing faster than you could put money away with two incomes. That further pushes Gen-z to opt out. “Me and the wife scrimped and saved and worked overtime every day and we managed to put away £20k this year. The house we wanted went up in price £100k”

The only way to reverse this is to massively increase housing stock and as a result tank the market. Pensioners pensions, company investments, government borrowing is all tied to the continued increase in house prices. We are heading straight for another post 2008 crash as either the social safety net cost balloons or the house prices crash, both leading to a total collapse of the economy

Have they consider the likelihood that being unemployed will make your mental health significantly worse?

Newsflash: life’s tough. Some (not all) older/middle aged folk also had it tough when they were young. Our forefathers went down mines, fought in shooting wars etc. Sorry, kids, but you need to hear this.