UK Young people are rejecting work. Why?

“I’m considering living in the wild, just trotting around the globe with little money,” reads a post on a Reddit forum for Neets. “I was working [in] a retail store and the first few hours were OK, then I had to deal with customers,” reads another. “I packed my bag and just left.”

In this forum, a community of 44,000 people from around the world share advice and discuss the challenges of being a Neet — an acronym for not in education, employment or training.

It is not just an online phenomenon. “I could never go back to working a normal job again,” Morgan, who left his role in 2020 and asked to remain anonymous, told the FT. “With inflation and rents rising, the incentive to devote all of my time to an employer to barely scrape by didn’t make sense any more.”

In the third quarter of this year, official UK figures showed 13 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds were Neets, nearly 1mn people. Two-fifths of these were looking for work; the rest were “economically inactive”, neither working nor looking, opting out of the labour market completely.

This puts the number of economically inactive young people close to its highest level — a similar story in Europe and the US, where more than 1 in 10 young people are Neets.

While the term first gained traction in 1990s UK government policy, which sought to help older teenagers into work, it has since been adopted internationally and by a wider subculture of economically inactive people. Reddit’s Neet forum includes people in their 50s; recent posts depict a “self-loathing man of inaction late 20s/early 30s” or ask if “30+ NEETS [can] turn their life around?”

After starting out as a car salesman ten years ago, Morgan, now 30, was forced out of work by depression and an illness that took him in and out of hospital. When he recovered, the pandemic had shut his industry down: he opted out of work, using the time to teach himself how to repair old cars and post videos online.

“My time to develop my interests was worth more than I could make working, even if it wasn’t making me any money,” he says. But eventually the bills began to pile up. “I was put out on the street for unpaid rent. I lived in my car for a few days before a friend took me in. I’m lucky that’s where I am today.”

Josh, 24, dropped out of university after deciding it wasn’t worth the money. “I went on to have a few retail jobs but I found it tough to interact with people in the workplace because of my social anxiety,” he told the FT. I’ve moved back in with my parents now, who are able to support me. I help my mum around the house and I’m trying to teach myself programming.”

Louise Murphy, economist at the Resolution Foundation think-tank, says mental health is one driver of rising Neet numbers: in 20 years, the proportion of young people reporting a disorder such as anxiety or bipolar has increased from a quarter to a third. This makes them more likely to be out of work: an RF report found between 2018 and 2022, 21 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds with mental health problems were jobless, compared with 13 per cent of those without.

Niall O’Higgins, an International Labour Organization economist, suggests younger people are also disenchanted with the quality of jobs on offer, and are “lacking prospects for development, workplace training and the ability to build up their options”.

Employers make themselves more attractive, he says, by offering flexibility and support, including “exploring alternatives in terms of organisation of work”. In a survey of Gen Z workers by talent sourcing platform A.Team, 80 per cent said the four-day working week should be the norm, 60 per cent would like a hybrid working model, and half valued training opportunities.

Murphy says nurturing relationships can have a significant impact. “When we asked what young people would change about the world of work, they didn’t ask for big, flashy reforms. They wanted to have more human, understanding managers.” This might include additions like one-to-one catch-ups which are not the norm in all professions.

“I resent the accusation that young people don’t want to work,” Morgan says. “Everyone wants to contribute, but the reward for devoting your time to doing so is no longer worth it in many cases.”

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Financial Times
Archive (December 23 2024)

 

[BradeRunna]

Because they're fucking lazy and there's no incentive to work nor punishment to not work. Cut the benefits from all, including Ali and Umbungo, for them to work or be deported - if foreign, or starve to death if they're native.

It may sound harsh, but a really fucking bad recession with absolute poverty and desperation is what the UK needs to really sharpen its' senses to what is important.

Anyone who says they're poor today - especially while using an iphone or having a netflix subscription, needs a tenner in a gulag.

Ok Boomer.

Absolutely not. The best time to be a grafter, to be someone who wants to work and climb the ladder, is now.
PL but i went to work in a warehouse picking items for dispatch in my late 30s. I had 2 years wage in the bank and did it to prove that I still have the graft. I was on a temp contract and the timeline from temp to perm was 18 months with another 18 months of perm before the chance of promotion. I was offered team leader after 4 months.

I work various jobs and when I'm in higher-level management, I can spot the super-stars on the shop floor a mile away. The older generation come in to work, the younger generation act like they're there by force and are always demanding more, while offering nothing.

Ok Boomer

the truly horrifying thing is those lifeless moving corpses that have made retail their career for years

It's not really their fault. There aren't any jobs out there except low paying service jobs these days. That's all there is after the US started deindustrializing in the 80's and 90's. Boomers have a hard time understanding this because they are out of touch. They haven't had to look for a job since the 70's or 80's. The people that understand this would be some of Gen X, especially the younger Gen X Millennials and Zoomers. But there are some people in these generations that went full Boomer and are just as out of touch as the actual Boomers. The problem is there isn't enough of them to selfishly squash any attempts at people trying to change things, so they won't be inconvenienced. The Boomers managed to do this by spending most of their lives yelling Communism at anyone who might suggest that there is something wrong with capitalism and the current system in the US. Kind of like the way people on the left shout racist and Nazi at anyone who suggest the grand multicultural social experiment in the US has failed.

That is genuinely fucking terrifying, holy shit.

It is. I imagine the amount of homeless will increase in the US over the next decade. All these Millennials and Zoomers will end up homeless eventually. It will reach a point the Boomers and Boomer tier types won't be able to just explain it all way as drug addicts drunks and mentally illness.

Easy to say “fuck work” when mommy and daddy still pay their way for everything while they’re well into their 20s.

Nobody likes working. If I could live comfortably sitting around on my ass enjoying my time as I want with no worries, you bet your ass I would. I work because I have no desire to be homeless, I work so I can afford what I want and live my life without being an adult loser mooching off my parents, and I work because I have a sense of self-pride and I’d feel like a failure not being able to support myself and having to rely on others for my survival.

Zoomers are just lazy fucks with enabling, equally childish parents.

Ok Boomer.

 

[JosephStalin]

Just for kicks, I'd love it if each poster in thread had their IRL age and geographic location attached to their comments. I want to see how much of the complaining is zoomers in urban environments and how much of the scoffing is boomers approaching retirement in suburbia.

69, living next to the Pacific in a town in coastal CA. Retired for good ten years ago.

 

[William Murderface]

I fully support confiscating all retirement accounts from boomers and all of the private property they've literally destroyed this country with their terrible social policy so they could get high at Woodstock boomers signed the 1965 immigration act rumours voted for the Civil Rights Act total boomer death

Boomers did not sign the 65 Immigration Act. They couldn't vote until they turned 21 at the time and the first baby boomers didn't show up until 1946. The first election they could vote in was in 1968 and even then they didn't have the numbers to make any real change in DC. The 1965 act was the WW1 and WW2 generation. It was the same generation that got us into Vietnam, started closing up American factories so they could buy from overseas for a third of the cost but never lowered the end price, and ended up stagnating wages to the point that mothers had to work which just drove down wages even further.

The Baby Boomers did plenty of damage later on, but they weren't responsible for what happened in the 1960s.

 

[Audit]

Boomers did not sign the 65 Immigration Act. They couldn't vote until they turned 21 at the time and the first baby boomers didn't show up until 1946.

It's a rather unpopular point to mention to millennials that realistically boomers could only have controlled US election results starting in the 80's at the earliest. At most, Bill Clinton and NAFTA could be pinned on them. Most of the real "blame" can be squarely pinned on the so-called greatest and silent generations who lived through the great depression and then decided to sow the seeds to ensure future generations would suffer. It wasn't boomers protesting for civil rights or demanding infinite off shoring to boost stock portfolios. That was the "silent" generation that grew up during the depression that would have been most politically active leading up to 1965. Most boomers hadn't even started college by the time the civil rights and immigration acts are passed.

In short, it wasn't your parents that ruined the country. It was your grandparents. Boomers were dodging the draft for 'nam while the old fogies were profiting off of united fruit ransacking latin america. Boomers are just an easy target for criticism by merit of being out of touch with reality because the country wasn't completely overrun with immigrants and HR dictators when they entered the labor force. Grandpa decided that you should have shit wages. Your dad is still very much confused that getting a good job takes nepotistic connections and that patronage networks are a very important "skill" to get anywhere in life.

 

[Your Greatest Ally]

And he turns to me and says, "Well how would you feel if they took your pension?", can you believe it folks? He thinks we're getting a pension. The nerve of this guy.

I maintain that no one under 40 is ever retiring. It will be a relic of the past that future historians will scratch their heads struggling to understand.

If minimum wage had kept pace since the early 70s, it would be $30/hr. If it was tied to the price of gold over the same time period - even before gold's recent massive price jump - it would be $100/hr.

Most of the problems of today have their roots in the 70s-90s, i.e., boomers. Boomers didn't just 'ruin the economy,' they ruined everything, everywhere, for everyone. There's no system that hasn't been negatively impacted by their generation. Their selfishness, short-sightedness, and bitter hatred for their children has been nothing short of breathtaking.

Edit: in case there's anyone that hasn't come across this before, here:

https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/0316395781

The author is a bit of a twat, and there's a few times he's dead wrong about certain points, but the thesis is accurate.

 

[Uncle Ted's Cabin]

Let's be real, blaming any generation for our immigration woes under the pretext of voting is ridiculous. Things are the way they are because our leaders do not give a shit about us on the best of days and threw everyone under the bus for kickbacks and cost reductions.

 

[666NASTYFUCKINGFREAK666]

Have seen this from different angles. In the military, had some great jobs, got a lot of responsibility much younger than my civilian counterparts. Was not just allowed but expected to use my brain.

After retiring from the military did various things. Only had one civilian job that compared with the things I did in the service, where I was allowed and expected to use my brain. The other jobs were mundane, to varying extents, but provided a paycheck. Retired for good ten years ago.

Both my kids started working as teenagers, displayed a very good work ethic. They are doing well.

These days see some of Generation Z who have the work ethic, and sadly, some who can barely make any effort but want everything handed to them for what little effort they make. No idea what they will do when those gibs run out, and don't care.

Some might say they will exchange work for room and board. Please...unless you are an attractive female willing to work those holes several times a week on demand it won't happen. You cannot do enough 'regular' work to justify the room and board.

The harder you work, the more luck you have. Stop bitching and make an effort. The world does NOT owe you a living.

As much as I hated the military, the amount of responsibility it gives you is batshit insane. Pardon the powerlevel, but I’ll say that when I was 18, months out of training we had an O3, O2 and an E2 (me) in charge of $40 million dollars worth of comm satellite jammers, and I was read into so much wild shit you’d shit bricks.

But I remember working 14 hour days then getting out of work, sitting in my car and opening my bank account to see $800 hit for 2 weeks work so that was fucking rancid.

It sets you up for so much success, I’m in my early 20s and I’m making $120k between my VA medical pension and my job and I’ll be going up to 140k once I get promoted, you just have to suffer in order to succeed.

As a Gen Zigger out of the 15 people in my workspace (entry level IT) there’s 2 of us (me included) putting their nose to the grindstone trying to grab certifications for workplace advancement, and 1 half assing their studying which is insane, because the whole point of entry level IT is to suffer while studying to get out and work a more technical job.

 

[Audit]

Let's be real, blaming any generation for our immigration woes under the pretext of voting is ridiculous. Things are the way they are because our leaders do not give a shit about us on the best of days and threw everyone under the bus for kickbacks and cost reductions.

I only blame the general population's rejection of the most sacred and holy of divine virtues, racism. God gave us racism to keep outsiders from ruining our civilizations. What did God tell the Jews upon reaching the holy land? Kill every Canaanite 'lest they become a torment to you in the future. Jesus has a whole dismissive screed to a Samaritan woman begging him for help. Blame every single NGO, charity, church, and bleeding heart who welcomed foreigners into their communities and helped them get established for the destruction of the first world. Nothing but harsh, universal, and constant racism can protect a nation from a traitorous ruling class. See also bigotry as the means through which God shows us his love of natural relations between a man and a woman, and a hatred of homosexuality, pedophilia, and zoophilia. Have you seen what happens to churches that hang the lgbt-welcome flag? Hell, the catholic church is in a tragic state for not lynching its own pedo priests in public executions held on St. Peters square.

TLDR: Boomers, and especially millennials, are atheists who defy the good word of racism and bigotry as clearly stated in both the NT and OT as the prescribed way to protect one's nation.

 

[BongoMongo]

No, they paid in. Whether the government mismanaged the money isn’t their fault. They worked straight out of school, often left school at 14. They were promised they’d be looked after. They rebuilt the country after the war. We’ve apparently got money to put millions of foreign fighting age men in nice hotels and send millions to foreign wars, and nothing for own elderly? No. We should look after our own cradle to grave. Someone who has worked all their life should not face poverty in their old age.

Lemme guess. You're fast approaching retirement and never saved a penny for it so you're desperate that the state pension remains.

Butbutbut muh soshul contract! Gubmint said they'd look after me! The welfare state from the cradle to the grave!!!!

Fuck right off with that mentality, it's as much a fucking pestilence as "imma get in a boat and go to UK and say I am gay or a Christian and lie and lie and lie and go back to my " unsafe" country and bring my cousin back and have a dozen retard babies".

 

[Myrtle the Turtle]

I maintain that no one under 40 is ever retiring.

Personally, I don't intend on retiring because work keeps you alive and sharp, but I should have the option to retire if I want to and so should everyone else.

I think a major portion of the issue is that every boomer wants to be kept alive despite having nothing useful to contribute to society anymore, and instead being a drain on critical resources. Im not talking about the people like Ioseph Stalin, Im talking about the dementia ridden people who cling on to life. People wasting thousands of dollars enriching nursing homes just so they can hear grandma barely mumble a few grunts and reek of urine in a wheelchair having no idea where she is. Its a massive burden on gen X and millennials. Zoomers won't put up with the nonsense because their future is being squandered at the cost of keeping decrepit husks alive.

I really hope the Trump admin finds some Alzheimer and dementia science breakthrough because currently the only option I support is euthanasia.

 

[Blue Flying Leaf]

It is. I imagine the amount of homeless will increase in the US over the next decade. All these Millennials and Zoomers will end up homeless eventually. It will reach a point the Boomers and Boomer tier types won't be able to just explain it all way as drug addicts drunks and mentally illness.

It is the ultimate blame game, that is why, and they are just proxies for government policies that benefited them for a while.
For example: Health insurance will reject the treatment because it's a pre-existing condition.
Actual reality: Zoomers, Xers and so on get blamed for not succeeding monetary wise: You are just too lazy, you don't want to work, you have no skills and so on ....
All the doors have been closed and all positions have been suppressed. Some of the upper management gets the cash, the rest is just trash menial jobs. It is easier to blame others (actual victims of gov. policies) than perpetrators of this system. Boomer bosses would rather die than let someone improve the situation at work because that will show they were incompetent for the good part of their work life. Most of corporations now exist only by inertia and there is 0 RD in actually improving things.

Once the elders retire, everything will quickly turn to shit. Their pensions don't even cover living costs.
Most of the US corporate world observes the ideology of never letting a single person know everything about work. This is beneficial for the corporation, because it destroys the competitive market and allows complete control over workforce but at the same time, dooms it, because everyone just pushes papers until the end of time and once the keystone person leaves or dies - everything grinds to a halt.

The awakening will be rude. Payeets don't care about a sorry rich boomer ass and in the world of inflation, what you have in your bank account is meaningless. You will get shanked for the iphone/jewlery you have.

US and EU made the rope they will hang from. Politicians exported all the wealth in existence to 3rd world countries and destroyed their own and now that shit is actively collapsing they are trying to distract everyone with conflicts and wars.
It is similar to the events in Haiti, where french colonizers got the memo that things were turning bad and they should leave at once, but decided to ignore it and kept partying until local savages broke into their homes and butchered them one by one.

Current society works by government ensuring you have - a home, food, family and you are willing to provide your own effort (work) to maintain that. It is kind of unsigned contract.
Given, that two of those don't exist anymore there is no point in supporting such a system.
The "authority" is trying to keep shit together by importing savages that only have food as a priority and also expecting them to run entire economy with less intelligence than a farm pig has - animal that only eats and shits whole day.
Food shortages are a direct result of this.

Government had a good use for the intelligent worker - to sustain it's own power and dominance. There is now no need for that and you see the decay of schooling and military as that is not a priority anymore and a replacement of low level labor with whatever it can get by. US is becoming a colony similar to the one of UK times - India.
Primary goal is just resource extraction and it ends there. Everything is shipped overseas.

The result is that cities - that are highly technologically advanced and they need such tech and intelligent people to operate will become depopulated.
Once the water lines break and there's noone to replace them or fix them, it's game over. Same with power, sewage, transport and so on ...
They just turn into a giant monuments to past glory.

 

[SirCliveSinclairdabbing]

There is a pride in the self reliance of providing for yourself that the neet lifestyle can't replace.

Work sets you free.

 

[Fruttasecca]

Total HR death would fix the issue in no time.

 

[Blacklight]

Sure doesn't endear me to work when a fucking troon with half the qualifications I have gets picked for a promotion just solely on the back of them turning their dick inside out.

 

[FedPostalService]

Sure doesn't endear me to work when a fucking troon with half the qualifications I have gets picked for a promotion just solely on the back of them turning their dick inside out.

Leave that organisation now. Seriously, get the fuck out of there. Unless you push a broom for a living if they’re appointing seriously incompetent (and very mentally unwell) people to senior positions then the future doesn’t bode well for it.

 

[Chaos Theorist]

Because they're fucking lazy and there's no incentive to work nor punishment to not work. Cut the benefits from all, including Ali and Umbungo, for them to work or be deported - if foreign, or starve to death if they're native.

It may sound harsh, but a really fucking bad recession with absolute poverty and desperation is what the UK needs to really sharpen its' senses to what is important.

Anyone who says they're poor today - especially while using an iphone or having a netflix subscription, needs a tenner in a gulag.

Kill yourself. The old people worked with their blood, sweat and tears, lived through more poverty and bullshit that you can imagine and earned every fucking penny of their pension.

You couldn't even last without the internet, let alone no electricity or water. Kill yourself.

Sanest Gerontocratic ponzi scheme enjoyer

 

[RussianBlonde]

Oy vey, just put in 50 hours a week (salaried, of course!) for $14/hr for the next 60 years, you lazy Gen Z'ers!

Productivity has grown 4:1 vs wages in the last 50 years. This doesn't even mention the fact that benefits at jobs are garbage, the cost of living has left the solar system, and infinite browns have made it so that there's no future for young people to have a stake in.

There's a disturbing amount of corporate whores in this thread.

As a corporate whore I agree. Think about how shit was getting done before the internet, which is not so long time ago really.
No meetings on zoom, no emails, you had a fucking telephone, paper files. If you wanted to get some document signed in another country you had to fucking send it by air mail or whatever that was they were using. Now everything is done 50 times quicker, is more efficient and its not enough.

So many people are accused of being workaholics, and I don't doubt quite a few of them are, but the reality is that most of them have to work outside of their working hours, on their days off etc, because they are being given an unrealistic workload and deliverables.
And it's not like you can say fuck it when you have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed.

Companies are working people to the bone and collecting the profits. "Get a college degree and work hard" made sense in the west for the past decades when salaries allowed people to buy a house and have a family in their 20s.

I don't blame Gen Z for being jaded. They are facing working 60hr weeks for pennies, unable to afford even a studio apartment. That's modern day slavery and I'm not anti capitalist but the system needs a hard reset.

 

[The Punished Mitch]

Spot the boomer has never been easier. You just have to look out for people who are very, very invested in keeping the ponzi going just a few decades longer - no matter the cost. The second obvious tell is being irrationally antagonistic towards the notion of young people not wanting to put in the same amount of effort their grandfather did for less than 5% of the payoff.

Looks like you came up a few dollars short with regards to paying into muh system there, buddy.

 

[ZeCommissar]

Honestly, I'm just waiting for all the damn Boomers to die off. No not because of "total Boomer death" or anything like that, but because that's when the real fun begins.

Don't even get me started on Boomers. Gen X seems apathetic and cucked, maybe they truly were ahead of their time. Millennials are even more retarded than Boomers and can't govern their way out of a wet paper bag.

Finally, Gen Z seems to be a mixture of all of the above to the extreme, and either have the political knowledge of a fucking dog while not caring at all or believe in terminally online shit like "Don't worry, our shitty 20th-century system which died decades ago will totally work this time!" coming from multiple sides of the political aisle.

The reemergence of the idea that politics is a true zero-sum game with undertones of "you must make sure to gain power and never ever give the enemy a chance of taking it away!" means things are going to be very interesting in the late 2030s+ once Boomers die off in enough numbers their political power starts to disappear and is left in the hands of the younger generations.

The world may seem like a scary place right now friends...but it's about to get a lot worse.

I haven't even talked about the economic side of things, just the political.

 

[RussianBlonde]

Lemme guess. You're fast approaching retirement and never saved a penny for it so you're desperate that the state pension remains.

Butbutbut muh soshul contract! Gubmint said they'd look after me! The welfare state from the cradle to the grave!!!!

Fuck right off with that mentality, it's as much a fucking pestilence as "imma get in a boat and go to UK and say I am gay or a Christian and lie and lie and lie and go back to my " unsafe" country and bring my cousin back and have a dozen retard babies".

The idea of having to save for retirement when you live in a first world country is insane. You pay taxes all your life, you're taxed on your salary , taxed when you buy something, taxed when you sell something, you have to pay to raise the children and you're also supposed to be saving for a fucking retirement?

Free healthcare , housing, looking after the elderly and disabled, these are pillars of a functioning developed society.

But no let's turn healthcare into a business, housing into investments, and let the old starve to death cos they didn't manage to save up for the final 20-30 years of their live.

Comparing a hard working person who spent their entire life contributing to the system and the society, to a migrant nigger free loader is so fucking stupid that I recommend you put a gun in your mouth and pull a trigger.