The gen-z'ers and their productive laziness
Happy Thursday everyone,
Bitcoin is hyped, Trump is hyping, I’m on a space-movie binge, and the gundo-bros are hiring. Was there a better time to be alive?
On to today’s topic. TLDR; laziness can be a catalyst for innovation.
There appears to be a common sentiment in today’s air that complain ‘the younger generation isn’t doing the real work’. The older generation is complaining that, in 2030, we won’t have any plumbers because the Gen Z kids (from now on, “genzers”) aren’t plumbing, they are product managers for b2b SaaS companies and on a permanent vacation in Italy.
However, one of the beauties of of technology is it’s adaptability. By it’s nature, it will fill a void. It will replace manual, difficult tasks that humans used to do but no longer need to because computers, machines, and robots can do them better. This isn’t always the case, and sometimes computers, machines, and robots are worse at doing even trivial tasks for humans.
Humans are good at being lazy. I have a close friend who is known for being lazy in a certain way, but he’s also one of the most creative individuals because of his laziness. Laziness (not all types of laziness) can bring about innovations that the hardest working would never have thought of, because the hardest of working people don’t stop to think. Instead, they just do. And the world is no better off because of it.
I’m assuming, but one could suspect the genzers of being lazy in a certain way. They don’t get their hands dirty like the previous generations. This can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. The majority of these genzers will be bad-lazy, but enough of them, when duty calls, will have to work with their hands, not want to, and so optimize themselves out of a job, building a company around such optimization. Such is the nature of progress, it’s an inescapable lesson of history and economics.
To complain about genzers not ‘working with their hands’ is like complaining that we don’t know how to operate a fax machine - it doesn’t really matter. Capitalism will fill most voids. If we need fax machines again, someone will do it (because they make money to do so, even a genzer will get off his but for 200k to fix fax machines because no one else will).
Until next time,
B. Brock