Opinion

For Gen Z, Unemployment Can Be a Blast.

NYU Stern campus

By Suzy Welch

As a regular old, capitalist Boomer gal teaching bright and shiny young M.B.A. students, I sometimes find myself wondering if Generation Z is brilliant or bonkers. Burnout, self-care, boundaries—they need and want them all, sigh. But because I love my students, and they so often surprise me with their profound self-awareness, boundless creativity and poignant longing to save the planet, I usually delight in the discrepancies in our understanding of how the world works. It will all sort itself out in the end, I tell myself, when they bump into reality.

But my equanimity was recently tested for the first time in a while, with graduation looming and summer almost upon us, when my students started throwing around the term “funemployment.” As in, “I’ll work when I work, until then, I’ll just do some funemployment.”

I literally screamed in class the first time a student casually mentioned that “funemployment” was her next step in life. “What, what, what?” I cried. “Are you literally saying funemployment—like unemployment can be fun?”

Read the full The Wall Street Journal article.
___
Suzy Welch is a Professor at NYU Stern.