Gen Z has discovered Morrissey and that working sucks. The Smiths' Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now is back in fashion, 42 years after its release, as online protest: that is, as the soundtrack to the memes we DM each other instead of working. The stars are unhappy twenty- and almost-thirty-somethings posting screenshots of conversations with their bosses. The line where Morrissey lands a job and finds out he’s worse off maps perfectly onto office memes.
One of my first seasonal jobs was in a bar in Como. I waited tables; I was seventeen or eighteen. I remember I didn’t know how to do anything, not even slice strawberries: I was cutting away the white part too, and the owner told me, «If you cut them like that, I’d shut this place down tomorrow» (yes, working sucks, but you also suck at working). The pay was three euros an hour, under the table. I lasted a day, which felt like it dragged on for a year given how atrociously I was suffering, and that summer I went and took the course to become a lifeguard. The following summer I was working at Villa d’Este and pulling in 20-euro tips.
It wasn’t the only one. I worked at Blockbuster just before it closed, which gives you an idea of how prehistoric I am: people used to leave the house and rent Blu-rays. I worked at a call center run by a woman with a photo of herself alongside Silvio Berlusconi, both of them younger and thinner, who—when I came over to tell her I wanted to quit—switched on the recorder and said, alarmed, «I’m recording all of this!», because she was bracing for the usual insults from people resigning. I worked at a flower shop, where I hauled vases for weddings. I worked at a restaurant, where I ran between kitchen and dining room forgetting half of everything, getting filthy and burning myself in the kitchen. None of these jobs buried me in money. Today I’d probably have shared the screenshots to wallow in self-pity.
Nobody likes working, certainly not me. Humanity divides into those with good, well-paid jobs (they’re few, they’re the ones you envy), good, badly paid jobs (I hope for your sake you come from money), bad, well-paid jobs (accountants know what I’m talking about), and bad, badly paid jobs, which are legion.
Let’s take it as given that the good, well-paid jobs have all already been snapped up. Whoever wasn’t sharp, shrewd or gifted enough has to fight over the bad well-paid ones and the bad badly-paid ones. Which means that working, for most people, is an unpleasant experience. That’s why lotteries and scratch cards do so well.
My generation and the ones after it wallow in the ironic meme, in the slogans that turn into cynicism merch, T-shirts, mugs, glowing insults that read like generational manifestos: you want unemployment benefits, everything gets fixed with a spritz, the weeks last too long and the weekends are short, and there are a thousand ways to look busy while you sleep at your desk. There’s only one thing worse than not finding a job: finding one.
Gen Z has learned to spot violated rights better. Good. But it risks losing the ability to tell the difference between an abuse and the road to adulthood. Not everything unpleasant is unjust. Not everything that doesn’t look like your calling is time wasted. Plenty of unlikely jobs don’t take you where you want to go: they teach you not to break before you get there. I think about it every time I slice strawberries.
One of my favorite things is watching other people succeed. I don’t mean the hagiography everyone writes about themselves on LinkedIn, but the reconstruction of how someone started out and worked hard to get where they are. YouTube is usually the right place. In an episode of Chapeau, a show that profiles Italy’s most important entrepreneurs, I come across the story of the twenty-six-year-old who quits his job, launches pole dancing courses and then a startup making leather grips for padel rackets. There’s the guy who works on his project for five years without a single fund investing in it, with his friends telling him to give it up. There’s Tommaso “Tommy” Mazzanti, the Antico Vinaio guy, who goes to work for his father and grows the family business to a turnover of 90 million. At one point Tommy says, basically, that he busted his ass, that he knew when he walked into the shop but not when he’d walk out. Yes, it was his father’s shop. But the money didn’t just fall on him.
We can’t all be entrepreneurs. Often behind these stories there’s a dad with money. But let’s look at it from another angle: very often people start out in crooked, marginal, unglamorous jobs. Counters, factories, tasks done only to learn or to survive. Some had nothing to do with what they’d later become. But they forced them to grasp very concrete things: how you talk to a customer, how you sell something, how you get through a pointless day, how you learn from someone more experienced even when they’re nothing like you. All things that, when you’re young, you generally don’t know how to do.
Today’s twenty-somethings are right when they call out fake internships, abusive bosses, laughable pay, illegal hours. Wait until you’re forty, when you won’t even be able to do a fake internship anymore. But alongside this well-earned awareness of rights, another skill seems to have weakened: the ability to move through imperfect jobs without experiencing them as an affront to your identity.
It’s often repeated that twenty- and thirty-somethings are more inclined to leave jobs that don’t offer enough flexibility. It’s told less often that they’re frequently the ones being very inflexible.
In an article in The Free Press, Larissa Phillips writes that the era of summer jobs for teenagers, which peaked in the 1970s, may have come to an end. The reasons are many: inflation, employers’ caution, the fear of hiring teenagers, but also parents more interested in protecting their kids than in pushing them toward independence. Phillips recounts summer jobs that were grueling, strange, at times unsettling, even dangerous, almost never mentioned to parents. That, she says, is exactly where a sheltered childhood meets the risks of the real world.
The old rhetoric of paying your dues served to cover up plenty of abuses. The new rhetoric of rights risks covering up another fragility: the idea that every friction is a wound, every boss an executioner, every boring task proof that the world doesn’t understand us. You’re not unhappy. You’re just young.
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