It’s the “Lazy Girl” life for me!

Wait. They’re making whut floating around?!

…Bilodeau and scores of other women online are bragging about their work setup using the hashtag #lazygirljob. To fans, the ideal lazy-girl job is one that can be done from home, comes with a chill boss, ends at 5 p.m. sharp and earns between $60,000 and $80,000 a year—enough to afford the basic comforts of young-adult life, yet not enough to feel compelled to work overtime. Veterans of such jobs say roles such as “digital marketing associate,” “customer-success manager” and “office administrator” are good bets for achieving the lazy-girl lifestyle.

GET ED BACK OVER HERE

The “comforts of young adult life” means you need $60-80 grand? How did we survive our youth on almost a third of that if we were lucky, even while most of us worked our butts off? I should add willingly, because that’s what you did. Worked hard, partied hard when you were done.

You didn’t go to the party instead of work.

Money don’t get everything, it’s true.

But what it don’t get, I CAN’T USE

I WANT MONEY

THAT’S ALL I WANT

~ The Flying Lizards

Practically our theme song.

My mental health is still suffering. If only I’d known what the answer was to a kinder, gentler, more chillax me…without having to give any creature comforts up.

…The TikTok and tech-savvy generation is leaning into the latest social media trend of finding well-paying often fully or partially remote jobs that require minimal effort to cut back on the stress and anxiety they say is harmful to mental health.

“[I’m] going out on walks, going out places, getting food, going shopping, just like, [doing] daily day-to-day things that I need to get done that, if I was working a job where I didn’t have the flexibility to do that, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” one woman told FOX Business.

“[I like to] do yoga, go out for walks and just do little random things like whatever seems fun that day,” another said.

Me, too. But I also grew up with the concept of “responsibility” and “adulting,” both of which lessons – to only mention a few – have not been even broached, less mind absorbed, by the vast majority of this current generation of millimeter deep Millennials including a fair amount of Gen Z-sters.

…”I spoke to a psychiatrist over at the Langone Medical School [about this]… Her argument – and it makes sense to me – is that, as boomer parents did everything they could to make their children’s lives perfect, they removed sources of anxiety,” NYU business professor Suzy Welch, who recently wrote a piece discussing the trend in The Wall Street Journal, told FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Tuesday.

“In that case, you don’t have any experience with it, and you fear it, and you run away from it instead of doing what I did, or many people did… you sort of plow through it, and you think, ‘Oh, that didn’t kill me? I can take anxiety. That’s just part of being a grown-up. And I don’t love it, but I’ll work through it.’ I call it paradox management.”

One 22 year old who’s built himself a real estate business is pretty disgusted with his whole peer group’s lack of initiative, and says this cutesy trend is only going to backfire. Not that they needed any more help underachieving.

I’m with him here, and I know out son Ebola is, too, having heard of his travails trying to get 18-20 something year old airmen acting like semi-adults. As I said, initiative, motivation, and personal responsibility are dying character traits that need to be quickly resuscitated. And it’s not all the kids. To be fair, some of them have never in their lives had any examples to follow – no mentors to emulate who evinced those qualities.

How would they know what they were? To their credit, when they see them, they want more.

…Though the trend is associated with “lazy girls” by stereotype, many speculate the issue isn’t gender-exclusive and can be applied across the Gen Z spectrum. Reno Davis, a 22-year-old entrepreneur and real estate expert, for instance, told Fox News Digital he thinks his entire generation is lazy and, while the trend of finding more laid-back jobs might work for them right now, trying to take the easy way out could have consequences in the future.

“By doing so, you don’t have any real-world experience, and so taking the easy way out sets them up for failure,” he said.

“At some point, they’re going to come upon an obstacle, and they’re not going to know how to deal with it because they take the easy way out, whether it would be with jobs or life in general. I think this leads to ultimate destruction later in life. It might be okay right now, but later in my career, I find out that it’s not the way to go about it.”

…”They like to do whatever is going on and so that’s why it’s so rare for people my age, I would say 25 and under, to be entrepreneurs and self-employed business owners, because it’s not something that’s common because it takes a lot to get here, a lot of failure, lots of everything. I also think social media plays a big part in it because people are just glued to their cell phones, and it’s full of distractions. It’s just complete, utter garbage, and people are just scrolling on their phones all day long.”

Risk avoidance, because the Everybody-Gets-a-Trophy generation has never had to face failure. No determination because they’ve been given chance after chance after chance – no one has ever said, “Enough. We’re done here.” Consequences for actions are non-existent. What missteps they’ve made in their lives have been papered over with excuses made by others. If they don’t show up for work, rarely are they fired. If they are, someone foots their bills until they score the next nowhere job or worse – someone goes to the trouble of scoring it for them.

Their good deed will inevitably burn them.

Other women are, like me, just pretty put out by the entire idea. It’s great for a part-time gig or summer off, but when this is as far as your aspirations take you?

Excuse us, what?

Are you familiar with the “anti- work” movement? No, I can’t afford to be, either.

Previously known as “bone idleness”, this online trend has seen scores of Generation Z women turning their backs on graft in favour of so-called “lazy girl” jobs. Young women have taken to bragging about their indolence on TikTok, where videos with the #lazygirljobs hashtag have gone viral, amassing millions of views.

“I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one, take breaks whenever I want & be the office baddie,” said one. Another says that all she does is “copy and paste the same emails, take 3-4 calls a day, take my extra long break, take more breaks AND get a nice salary”. A third describes leaving whenever she’s done for the day and taking “as many breaks as I need”. It remains unconfirmed which branch of the Civil Service they work for.

As someone who has always believed in good, old fashioned hard work, I’m puzzled. Nearly 100 years of women’s suffrage, and this is the best the next generation can do?

Aspirational seems to be either the dirty word of the moment, or it has simply disappeared completely from the lexicon. And what does this bode for employers in the future? Megan McArdle hit on a concerning couple points about the “lazy girl job” trend (phenomena?) for the WaPo a couple days ago while adding cautionary notes.

To wit: Young girlfriends, this isn’t all there is to life.

…This mirrors what we have been hearing from corporate managers recently: Your teams might be able to hit their deliverables remotely, but they aren’t building up the kind of human capital that leads to longer-term growth. Though, of course, the #lazygirl might ask why she should burn valuable hours today to get a better job tomorrow if the job she has right now is good enough.

One answer is that your 26-year-old self doesn’t necessarily know what 40-year-old you will like. Maximizing self-care and travel opportunities might not be as appealing when you have backaches and toddlers; by then, you might rather have money for more bedrooms and better after-school care. Unfortunately, you’ll probably figure this out only when it’s too late to call backsies.

But there’s another way I’d gently suggest that aspiring young #lazygirls might be blinded by their shorter time horizons: They haven’t yet seen how much the economy can change. With the brief exception of the early pandemic, when record unemployment was papered over by record government unemployment checks, Gen Z has experienced only a market with more jobs than workers to fill them. Thus, they don’t know what millennials and Generation X learned the hard way: The kinds of jobs that are most fun to have in boom times are often the most risky in a downturn, because when a recession comes, who will employers let go first? The “quiet quitters,” or the “second worst person on your team” (a strategy Judge advises in one video), or the remote workers they barely know.

We have had relatively stable, “good” economic times for these past two generations, unlike the 80s and early 2000s. McArdle is so right about not knowing what they don’t know, and it can turn fast. The hustlers and those who are used to busting their buns with goals in mind are the ones who are least likely to be overwhelmed when things turn south. Your career as an “influencer” will dry up faster than that open $60 bottle of hyaluronic acid toner you’re hawking if no one can afford food, less mind the vapid beauty geegaws of prosperity.

Go have a good time…

…but make sure you’re GOING somewhere in the meantime.