Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A
millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched over their MacBooks,
enduring back-to-back
Zooms in between sourdough loaves and Peloton rides, they
are flipping the carefully arranged chessboards of their lives and deciding to
risk it all.
اضافة اعلان
Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new
business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that
screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and
threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they
want.
They are emboldened by rising vaccination rates and a recovering
job market. Their bank accounts, fattened by a year of stay-at-home savings and
soaring asset prices, have increased their risk appetites. And while some of
them are just changing jobs, others are stepping off the career treadmill
altogether.
If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO” — “you only
live once,” an acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and
deployed by cheerful risk-takers ever since. The term is a meme among stock
traders on
Reddit, who use it when making irresponsible bets that sometimes pay
off anyway. (This year’s GameStop trade was the archetypal YOLO.) More broadly,
it has come to characterize the attitude that has captured a certain type of
bored office worker in recent months.
To be clear: The pandemic is not over, and millions of Americans
are still grieving the loss of jobs and loved ones. Not everyone can afford to
throw caution to the wind. But for a growing number of people with financial
cushions and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are
giving way to a new kind of professional fearlessness.
I started hearing these stories this year when several
acquaintances announced that they were quitting prestigious and high-paying
jobs to pursue risky passion projects. Since then, a trickle of
LinkedIn updates has turned into a torrent. I tweeted about it, and dozens of stories
poured into my inboxes, all variations on the same basic theme: The
pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t have to live like this.
Brett Williams, 33, a lawyer in Orlando, Florida, had his YOLO
epiphany during a Zoom mediation in February.
“I realized I was sitting at my kitchen counter 10 hours a day
feeling miserable,” he said. “I just thought: ‘What do I have to lose? We could
all die tomorrow.’”
So he quit, leaving behind a partner position and a big-firm
salary to take a job at a small firm run by his next-door neighbor, and to
spend more time with his wife and dog.
“I’m still a lawyer,” he said. “But I haven’t been this excited
to go to work in a long time.”
If “languishing” is 2021’s dominant emotion, YOLOing may be the
year’s defining workforce trend. A recent Microsoft survey found that more than
40 percent of workers globally were considering leaving their jobs this year.
Blind, an anonymous social network that is popular with tech workers, recently
found that 49 percent of its users planned to get a new job this year.
“We’ve all had a year to evaluate if the life we’re living is
the one we want to be living,” said Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at
Harvard Business School. “Especially for younger people who have been told to
work hard, pay off your loans and someday you’ll get to enjoy your life, a lot
of them are questioning that equation. What if they want to be happy right now?”
Fearful of an exodus, employers are trying to boost morale and
prevent burnout. LinkedIn recently gave the majority of its employees a paid
week off, while Twitter employees have been given an extra day off per month to
recharge under a program called #DayofRest. Credit Suisse gave its junior
bankers $20,000 “lifestyle allowances,” while Houlihan Lokey, another Wall
Street firm, gave many of its employees all-expenses-paid vacations.
Raises and time off may persuade some employees to stay put. But
for others, stasis is the problem, and the only solution is radical change.
“It feels like we’ve been so locked into careers for the past
decade, and this is our opportunity to switch it up,” said Nate Moseley, 29, a
buyer at a major clothing retailer.
Moseley recently decided to leave his $130,000-a-year job before
June 1 — the date his company is requiring workers to return to the office.
Disillusioned workers with money to spare have always gone
soul-searching. And it’s possible that some of these YOLOers will end up back
in stable jobs if they spend through their savings, or their new ventures
fizzle. But a daredevil spirit seems to be infecting even the kinds of
risk-averse overachievers who typically cling to the career ladder.
In part, that’s because more people than ever can afford to take
a risk these days. Stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and a stock
market boom have given many workers bigger safety nets. Many sectors now face
severe labor shortages, meaning that workers in those fields can easily find
new jobs if they need them. (Not all of these are high tech; many restaurants
and trucking companies, for example, are struggling to fill open jobs.) US job
openings rose to a two-year high in February, and economists and business owners
expect more turnover in the months ahead, as workers who stayed put during the
pandemic start emerging from their bunkers.
“Lots of things were on hold during the pandemic,” said Jed
Kolko, the chief economist at Indeed.com. “To some extent, we’re seeing a year’s
worth of big life changes starting to accelerate now.”
Individual YOLO decisions can be chalked up to many factors:
cabin fever, low interest rates, the emergence of new get-rich-quick schemes
like Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and meme stocks. But many seem related to a
deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing
in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.
Several people in their late 20s and early 30s — mostly those
who went to good schools, work in high-prestige industries and would never be
classified as “essential workers” — told me that the pandemic had destroyed
their faith in the traditional white-collar career path. They had watched their
independent-minded peers getting rich by joining startups or gambling on
cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, their bosses were drowning them in mundane work,
or trying to automate their jobs, and were generally failing to support them
during one of the hardest years of their lives.
“The past year has been telling for how companies really value
their workforces,” said Latesha Byrd, a career coach in Charlotte, North
Carolina. “It has become challenging to continue to work for companies who
operate business as usual, without taking into account how our lives have
changed overnight.”
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