Dream Job

Informed by economic volatility, the pandemic, and rounds of recent layoffs in the tech world—the class of 2024 is prioritizing consistency. Job stability is the top consideration for these Gen Zers when applying for work, among 76% of Handshake respondents.

If you do what you love, the saying goes, you’ll never work a day in your life.

...I’ll admit that I had a hard time typing that with a straight face. Was it ever that simple?! In reality, tying something you love doing directly to your financial stability is logistically and emotionally fraught, to say the least.

Joel has said that the song reminds listeners that “you don’t have to squeeze your whole life into your 20s and 30s trying to make it, trying to achieve that American dream, getting in the rat race and killing yourself. You have a whole life to live.”

The refrain of “slow down, you’re doing fine” soothes a specific kind of Gen Z malaise, reminding... See more

Instead, they will be faced with the challenge of finding meaningful work in a world set up to exploit their labor. They’ll need all the help we can give them.

The graduating class is less focused on nabbing that shiny tech gig, and instead looking to the ol’ trusty field of of government jobs. So shows a recent survey of more than 2,600 students from Handshake, an undergraduate recruitment company. As tech jobs dwindle, interest is waning for Gen Zers who seek less chaos in their career prospects.

Can there be passionate production within capitalist employment that isn’t exploitative? Exploitation doesn’t just exist at the individual level, where individual workers feel exploited in their own jobs. People who are passionate about their work may genuinely not feel exploited. Yet, exploitation in the broader sense is about the reward workers... See more

The potential for passion to be exploited—either the passion of workers who have it, or by expecting workers to perform it—was a deep-cutting finding that led to my own reckoning with my perspectives about work.

In The Trouble with Passion , Erin demonstrates how the commodification of passion in the contemporary workplace perpetuates class inequality in college and beyond. While passion may seem, on the surface, to be highly individualistic, she details the many ways that it is actually rooted in structural positions and identities.