ISSUE NO. 05: MODERN VALUES

From girlboss ambition to anti-work disillusionment, a generation renegotiates the meaning of success under late capitalism

By Laura Pitcher

There is a quote that became a viral sensation a few years ago, “I have no dream job, I do not dream of labor.” Often misattributed to the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, in reality the quote, like many ideas that resonate with a generation raised on the Internet, is likely to have started life as a post by @thetrudz on X (then Twitter) in 2019: “My ‘dream job’ is . . . not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.” From X, the sentiment quickly evolved into a TikTok meme, whose viral popularity could be said to be emblematic of a generation’s growing ‘anti-work’ ethos – to quote the multi-billionaire Kim Kardashian, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”

Certain themes started to emerge in this new ‘anti-work’ era — the ‘empowerment’ of the ‘girlboss’ figure was cast in a new, unflattering light, and a broader class consciousness seemed to be on the rise. It’s important to note too, that this growing disenchantment with the very idea of work can’t be separated from modern working conditions: both the hellish state of the job market and contemporary workplace culture. If a job was no longer the dream, then perhaps a brighter future in which labor was not the center of our lives and identities might be on the horizon. But, in a reality still structured and configured by the logic of capitalism, has this growing disillusionment with labor really played out meaningfully in the workforce, and in our approach to work itself?

Traditional markers of professional ambition are undoubtedly losing traction with a new generation of workers. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, only 6 percent of Gen Z respondents believe their primary career goal is to reach senior leadership. Beyond a disenchantment with a career trajectory that ends at the top, there are signs that expectations of work, and the loyalty given to a workplace, are changing too. A 2024 report by Randstad found that Gen Z employees now average just 1.1 years per job. While it would be easy to attribute this to the precarity of modern work, or to individual restlessness, researchers instead believe these short stints are linked to what they termed ‘growth-hunting’ – a search for environments that foster development rather than mere advancement. It seems clear that young people want more – whether that’s purpose, flexibility, alignment with their values, or all three – from their work.

One argument for all this change could be that this new generation of workers simply don’t have the same work ethic, or ability to slug it out, as their predecessors. Generations have been saying this of their younger counterparts for decades, and it’s a logic that you can often see play out directly in a workplace: why should it be easier for them than it was for me? But this kind of thinking would have prevented many of the worker’s rights we now take for granted, for instance paid holiday leave and maternity pay. Plus, young people today are questioning work norms in an ever-shifting landscape in which many roles have been called into question by the rapid advancements in AI. That’s not even to mention the precarity of many jobs right now: are young people less ‘loyal’ to their employers, or have they simply clocked the frequent layoffs across industries? A recent Challenger report found that January 2026 had the highest rate of job cuts since 2009.

One recent study by John Hopkins University found that 73 percent of Gen Z employees want more flexible approaches to work, outside of the conventional 9-5. This likely relates to the homeworking that became a norm during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period which for many brought about a new relationship with work and the physical office. It could also be seen, though, as a reaction to productivity-tracking culture, which sees workplaces increasingly become sites of surveillance, where employers track employee’s keyboard use, movements and phone calls. One piece in the New York Times illustrated cases of some workplaces docking employee’s wages for time perceived to be ‘idle.’

This new ‘anti-work’ era makes a stark contrast with the era of the ‘girlboss.’ As a child growing up in the 2000s, I can remember it being common for adult women to issue me with a warning: not to let my life, or purpose, become intertwined with a man. Culturally, this was the message too, with depictions of career women, like Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods, underlining the point that to work was aspirational. Although the women’s liberation movement had challenged ideas, and laws, inhibiting women from the workforce since the ‘70s, like many revolutionary movements, the beliefs of feminism had filtered out to popular life slowly throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. By the early aughts, the idea of finding self-actualization through work, rather than marriage, had become enshrined as a valid and necessary pursuit. The message was clear: through work you could find the fulfillment, and empowerment, denied of your grandmothers, and the women before her too.

From the ‘90s onwards, however, this political position also became warped through capitalism into something different to independence from, and the dismantling of, patriarchy. Instead, freedom became the idea of your own office and a six-figure salary. Not to mention the idea that I, and many other young women, took to heart, that it was truly possible to ‘have it all.’

Within this capitalist framework, rather than a political project, a certain kind of female advancement within the workplace became little different to the patriarchal models already existing. Take the girlbosses of the 2010s. A term coined by entrepreneur and Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso in 2014, these were ‘it-girls’ who gained power in the working world, usually by exploiting workers in a similar way to their prominent male CEO counterparts. Their worth was not defined by their husbands, but instead by their ability to force their way up the corporate ladder, and while it could be argued that this was a version of feminism, it was one that was radically divorced from the intersectionality and solidarity that had defined the original feminist movement.

This flawed take on labor feminism came crashing down in 2020, through a reckoning of female-led start-ups, when the likes of Leandra Medine Cohen, the founder of the fashion blog Man Repeller, Audrey Gelman, CEO and co-founder of The Wing, and Yael Aflalo, CEO and founder of the clothing brand Reformation, stepped down after stories emerged of toxic workplaces. In Aflalo’s case, when Reformation posted about Black Lives Matter, it prompted a conversation around the brand’s treatment of Black people. Allegations of racism emerged on social media from past employees, and she resigned as CEO as a result. (Though she reemerged with a new clothing line last year).

This 2020 reckoning of the girlboss coincided with a broad disenchantment with the job market and modern working conditions, and also the Covid-19 pandemic. During lockdowns, many people witnessed the government’s failure to protect frontline workers, and many got their first taste of working from home. As AI automation has accelerated over the past few years too, even if people still wanted to #Girlboss or #Boyboss, it can feel like there are fewer and fewer ways to. Moving into a “post-work” world was both a shift in mindset and a reaction to the reality forced upon us: the previously laid-out career paths feel like they are starting to disappear. Young worker despair has been rising in the United States for about a decade, with over half of young adults in a recent study saying they have recently experienced little or no purpose or meaning in their lives. For a generation shaped by burnout, economic precarity, and a reexamination of identity through work, success may be redefined from “climbing the ladder,” no matter the cost, to building a life that aligns with one’s values.

As people scramble away, either by choice or by lack of choice, from hierarchical ambition toward purpose, balance, and growth, many are replacing their larger career goals with more personal goals that perhaps feel more achievable. There was even an EY study that shows young adults are prioritizing their physical and mental health over wealth and career success. The reality is, though, for most people, that we do still need to somehow make a living, no matter how low down this gets in terms of priorities. While we may be moving away from extreme wealth, and the top of the career ladder, in terms of aspiration, work, in whatever form it takes, is still a necessary part of most people’s reality. So what might a reprioritized understanding of work look like?

Radical alternatives to work don’t present themselves easily. Online, the options promoted are still ultimately infused with the mindset of productivity and optimization. On social media, some people preach that you should try to find the most mindless, remote job. That way, you can clock in while sitting by the pool on vacation. In many of these online reinterpretations of work, the goal becomes not finding meaning through labor, or challenging existing ideas of what a job might be, but simply maximizing profit by whatever means possible. I’ve seen people promote holding down two remote jobs in order to reach the combined salary of their dreams. Others emphasize the importance of always having a side-hustle and maintaining multiple streams of income—so you never need to rely on just one corporation. A strong theme running through many of these posts and accounts is the idea that you should try to make the most money possible in the shortest amount of time, so that you can have more time back for yourself. These people are often also their own bosses, which adds another dimension to the idea of labor, control and reporting to someone else.

Broadly, the ‘anti-workforce’ of today is composed of everyone from motivational life coaches who promise retirement at 30 (but only if you follow them and buy their e-book) to tradwife influencers, who believe the only issue with labor was women working to begin with. This warping of the feminist aims of the ‘70s could be seen as a natural evolution of the girlboss, in that it doesn’t require any fundamental change to the existing roles within a patriarchal society. Many online tradwife influencers also upload multiple videos a week, and manage social media empires, with the same spirit of efficiency as the girlbosses.

The reemergence of conservative roles and values, now packaged as if they are radical or emancipatory, is compelling when faced with the issues of modern employment. The logic of the tradwives has proved surprisingly insidious, even liberal women I know will share memes that say things like, “This is who you are asking to work 40 hours a week,” with an image of a cute animal or toy wearing pink. It could be argued that these women are rejecting the very idea of work, with the notion that they should exist outside of the workforce entirely. However, in their vision, paid labor still very much exists, it’s simply done by the men that they have chosen to be dependent on. More than this, in the tradwife model, decades-old arguments about the value of housework and domestic labor become erased; it’s not that the tradwives don’t work, they simply work in the home, but without the freedom that an independent bank account promises.

Attempting to shift culture away from a person’s value being tied up in their work hasn’t been as simple as divesting from work culture. No longer able to rely on the security of one career or company, young people are increasingly turning the corporation inwards. A conversation has emerged in recent years about differentiating yourself in the market through developing a personal brand online, and more than this, one recent study found that more than half of young people now aspire to be influencers. Poor working conditions can be sold back as empowerment in this model: like requiring a side hustle just to make ends meet, or being forced to work freelance for more ‘flexibility’, but no paid holiday, maternity pay or health insurance.

While working your way up to becoming CEO of a brand may no longer be aspirational, the dominant messaging of the anti-work era is still deeply influenced by capitalism, and a billionaire, Kim Kardashian, mentality. The focus is on either escaping or hacking a failing system, instead of organizing en masse for a new system that works for everyone. Even if people have tried to decenter work, the structures have remained, and those structures are designed to line the pockets of some by relying on the hard work of the many. As Audre Lorde famously put it: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Over the past 50 years, the middle class has been shrinking while the upper class is booming. In the US, the top 1 percent holds 31 percent of total wealth, which is just slightly less than the entire bottom 90 percent of households. As we’ve learned from past figures of faux-empowerment, like the girlboss, freedom can often be sold back to workers by a perceived escape route. It’s often extremely narrow, so that only a few people can fit. Today, it reemerges with the promise that turning ourselves into corporations, either through personal branding or buying into the idea that we ourselves need to be optimized, means that we can one day become irreplaceable. This may help some become early retirement influencers, but it’s not a solution that will work for the workforce in its entirety, so it’s not really a solution. It certainly won’t deliver a world without “labor.” So perhaps the dream, then, does include labor, but more fairly distributed and democratically rewarded, after all.