Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work.

When young people stop believing long term effort will improve their lives, something important is lost

Excerpt: "Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that “basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.”

...Ms. Perez looks at her peers with alarm, and not because she worries about unemployment rates. “It’s like there’s no motivation,” she said. Others I spoke to rendered similar judgments. Adreanna Marin, a 39-year-old aspiring social worker at California State University, San Marcos, who first started college 20 years ago, told me, “It almost seems like ambition is no longer existent, honestly, among college students.”

Many students blamed smartphones, the boogeyman of our age. “We are the future, and we can change it,” Jaasiel Hernandez, 20, an engineering student at Porterville College in California, said. “But it’s easier to sit down and scroll.” His comment echoed a common fear: If you live on autopilot, you’ll turn 30 in your parents’ basement, unemployed, in debt and glued to your feed."