JESSICA GROSE2025年11月18日 Eleanor DavisThe older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation. In my 20s, there seemed to be an endless supply of commentary about how we millennials were lazy and entitled, just like the members of Generation X before us were slackers. Members of Gen Z get the bad rap of being “unemployable,” because apparently they do not prize achievement for its own sake, or they’d rather be influencers because the internet has broken their brains.老一辈人总爱对年轻一代的职场抱怨不以为然。在我二十多岁的时候，舆论似乎没完没了地评论我们千禧一代如何懒惰、自以为是，就像当年说X世代是懒虫一样。如今Z世代又被贴上“没法胜任工作”的标签，只因他们不求上进，或是想当网红——仿佛互联网摧毁了他们的理智。Gen Z-ers don’t even deserve this perfunctory slander, because the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal over the past decade.Z世代其实不该背负这种草率的诋毁，因为过去十年间，找到并保住一份入门级工作的整个过程，已经变成了一场令人筋疲力尽、失去人性的折磨。Certainly the job market seems grim in this moment. Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, described it as “an awful traffic jam.” “If you’re just out of college, you’re trying to merge into a freeway and nobody is letting you in,” he explained. Employers at companies like Airbnb and Intuit almost sound excited talking to The Wall Street Journal about staying lean and culling the number of employees they have, as long as it creates short-term profits.眼下的就业市场确实显得严峻。罗斯福研究所的首席经济学家迈克尔·马多维茨形容它像“一场可怕的大塞车”。他说：“如果你刚从大学毕业，就像在试图并入一条高速公路，而没人愿意让你进来。”像爱彼迎和Intuit这些公司的管理层在接受《华尔街日报》采访时，对于如何保持精简、削减员工人数来换取短期利润几乎是津津乐道的态度。But the whole experience of work for young people has been tortured for far longer than the economy has been stalled. Earlier this year, my colleague David Brooks spoke to a college senior who called young Americans “the most rejected generation,” describing the hypercompetition that has bled into all aspects of life, even for the most privileged college-educated strivers.早在眼下的经济停滞期开始之前，职场的体验对年轻人来说就已经是煎熬了。今年早些时候，我的同事戴维·布鲁克斯与一名大四学生对话，后者称美国年轻人是“被拒绝最多的一代”，激烈的竞争已渗透生活的各个角落，即便是享有特权的名校精英亦难幸免。Because most job applications are submitted online, the bar to applying is so much lower than it was in the analog world decades ago, and so for any open role, applicants are competing with hundreds of people. The sense of scarcity and lack starts earlier, because so many selective colleges boast about their record-low admissions rates.因为如今大多数求职申请都是在线提交的，比几十年前纸质申请的门槛低得多，所以每一个空缺职位都意味着要与上百个竞争者较量。资源稀缺和匮乏的感觉，则开始的更早，毕竟众多精英大学还在得意地宣称录取率达到了史上最低。But now artificial intelligence is performing the first few rounds of culling, including early screening, which is further dehumanizing and gamifying the application process. Richard Yoon, who is an economics major at Columbia, told me that when his peers have multiple interviews for jobs in finance, he asks if they heard back from any of them. They tell him: “You don’t understand. Like 19 of those 20 interviews were with bots.”如今人工智能更承担了初步的筛选工作，包括首轮简历筛选，这使求职过程进一步非人化，沦为游戏规则。哥伦比亚大学经济学专业学生理查德·尹告诉我，当他的同学在金融业经过多轮面试后，他问及后续进展时总是得到这样的回答：“你不明白。20场面试里至少有19场是和机器人在聊。”It’s customary for job seekers to review their résumés for keywords they think A.I. likes, Yoon told me, so that they might have a chance of getting through the digitized gantlet and one day making human contact that could possibly lead to a job offer. Or at the very least a real-life networking connection. Yoon called the process “dystopian.”尹告诉我，求职者如今都习惯在简历里堆砌自以为人工智能偏好的关键词，只有这样，他们才有可能闯过数字化筛选的关卡，获得与真人接触的机会，进而争取工作邀约。或者至少建立起真实的职场人脉。他称这是个“反乌托邦”的过程。But once you actually have a job, the real dystopia begins. Young people feel as if jobs offer far less mentorship and more micromanaging. Stevie Stevens, who is 27 and lives in Columbus, Ohio, told me that she left a full-time job in July at an exhibition design and production firm because she felt hyperscrutinized and undersupported. “Managers expect you to do six jobs in a 40-hour workweek. My company had mediocre benefits and offered little to no professional growth or training,” she told me.但踏入职场后，真正的反乌托邦才开始。年轻人感到工作中的指导扶持变少了，而微管理却无处不在。27岁的斯蒂薇·史蒂文斯现居俄亥俄州哥伦布市，她告诉我，她在7月辞去了在一家展览设计与制作公司的全职工作，因为她觉得自己被过度审视却缺乏支持。她说，“经理们希望你在每周40小时的工作时间内完成六个人的工作。公司福利平平，难以获得职业成长或培训机会。”Stevens also said that what she calls “surveillance state technologies” — apps that synthesized her personal data to determine her level of effort — are part of that feeling of micromanagement. Though she doesn’t have benefits through work now and deals with more uncertainty as a freelancer, she is happier because she has autonomy and control over her time and her efforts.史蒂文斯还提到她所谓的“监控国家的技术”——那些通过整合个人数据来评估工作投入度的应用程序——正是她感到被过度管理的来源之一。尽管如今自由职业缺乏福利保障且收入不稳，她却因能自主掌控时间与工作节奏而备感轻松。For the past several years, employers have used “bossware” to track worker productivity. A Times investigation in 2022 found that across professional fields and pay grades, employers were tracking keyboard use, movements and phone calls, and docking employees for time that they perceived to be “idle.”过去几年，雇主一直在使用所谓的“老板软件”来追踪员工的工作效率。《纽约时报》在2022年的一项调查发现，在各个职业领域和薪资等级中，雇主都在监控键盘使用频次、移动轨迹与通话记录，并且会扣除他们认为员工在“偷懒”的时间。That kind of tracking doesn’t account for things like conversations with peers, thinking — you know, with your brain — or, if you work in a warehouse, taking a rest so your body doesn’t fall apart. At least older workers knew a time before this tracking was ubiquitous, and at this point might be senior enough to have the leverage to push back against the most extreme types of surveillance.这种监控方式并没有考虑到一些事情，比如同事间的交流、思考——你懂的，用大脑思考——更遑论给仓储工人留出避免身体透支的必要休憩。至少年长的员工还记得在这种监控无处不在之前的时代，如今他们的职位也足够高，有资本去抵制极端的监视行为。It’s no wonder, then, that a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July found that young worker despair has been rising in the United States for about a decade. Its co-authors, David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a yearly federal health survey of 400,000 Americans, focusing on how many bad mental health days — ones described as containing “stress, depression and problems with emotions” — a worker had in the past month. They then created a mental despair measurement using the number of bad mental health days, comparing mental despair across demographic, employment and educational characteristics.美国国家经济研究局在七月份发表的一份工作文件的发现，因此也就在意料之中了。文件称美国年轻劳动者的绝望感在过去十年里持续上升。两位合著者——戴维·布兰奇弗劳尔和亚历克斯·布赖森——分析了行为风险因素监测系统的数据，这是一项针对40万名美国人的年度联邦健康调查，重点关注过去一个月中，劳动者经历的“不好的心理健康日”的数量，即那些“充满压力、抑郁和情绪问题”的日子。他们据此建立了一个“心理绝望指数”，并将不同人口、职业和教育背景群体之间的心理绝望程度进行了对比研究。Blanchflower and Bryson found that for workers under 25, mental health is now so poor that they are generally as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts, which is new in the past several years. The rise in despair is particularly pronounced among women and the less educated. Last year, job satisfaction for people under 25 was about 15 points lower than it was for people over 55. This was true in the same year that satisfaction rose for every other age group, according to a survey from the Conference Board. The unhappiness of young workers seemed so pronounced in the past year — whether because of the rapid rise of A.I., the uncertainty of the market, or some other rancid combination of post-Covid malaise and general disaffection.布兰奇弗劳尔与布莱森发现，25岁以下职场群体的心理健康状况已严重恶化，其痛苦程度普遍与失业者相当——这一现象在过去几年才出现。绝望情绪的上升在女性和受教育程度较低的人群中尤为显著。去年，25岁以下人群的工作满意度比55岁以上人群低了大约15个百分点。美国世界大型企业联合会的调查显示，在同年，其他所有年龄组的满意度都在上升。年轻劳动者的不满在过去一年里尤为明显——无论是因为人工智能的迅速崛起、市场的不确定性，还是新冠疫情后的倦怠与普遍不满交织形成的某种恶劣组合。I called Bryson to find out more about why young workers are so unhappy. He has two hypotheses. One is that the perception of work satisfaction has changed: Young people expect to be happier than previous generations were, in part because they’re using social media to compare themselves to some of their peers, only to then find themselves disappointed by the tedium of their own 9-to-5s. But the other hypothesis is in line with what I’m hearing from young people: The workplace is markedly worse.我打电话给布赖森，想进一步了解为什么年轻劳动者如此不快乐。他提出了两个假说。其一是，工作满意度的认知发生了变化：年轻人抬高了幸福预期，部分原因是他们在社交媒体上不断与同龄人比较，结果却发现自己的朝九晚五单调乏味，从而备感失落。另一个假说则与我从年轻人那里听到的情况一致：职场环境的确变得更糟了。Employers might not extend the workday, Bryson speculated, but the amount of work expected in each hour is “intensifying” because every move is captured and cataloged by employers. This makes employees feel as though they have no job control, which “is a fundamental tenet in terms of job quality, the idea that you feel that you have some degree of autonomy over what you’re doing rather than just being directed as an automaton,” Bryson said.布赖森推测，虽然雇主可能并没有延长工作日的时间，但每小时被期待完成的工作量正在“加剧”，因为员工的每一个动作都被雇主记录和归档。这让员工觉得丧失了对工作的掌控力，而这种掌控感“是衡量工作质量的核心要素之一，也就是你觉得自己对所做的事情拥有一定的自主性，而不是像机器一样被人操控”，布赖森说道。Gen Z-ers seem to be having a few disparate reactions to this state of play. Both Stevens and Yoon told me that they see entrepreneurship as potentially safer than corporate work at this point. Yoon told me he saw a family member spend decades at a Fortune 500 company only to get unceremoniously laid off, and it has made him consider a less traditional path. The other is unionization. Bryson wondered if the renewed support for unionization among young people in the United States is an antidote to this misery.Z世代似乎对这种局面出现了几种不同的反应。斯蒂文斯和尹都告诉我，他们认为创业现在可能比在公司打工更安全。尹说，他看到一位家人在一家财富500强企业工作了几十年，却遭粗暴裁员，这促使他重新审视传统职业路径。另一种反应则是加入工会。布赖森推测，美国年轻人中对工会支持度的回升，也许正是对抗这种痛苦的一种解药。Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain. At least I got rejected to my face when I was in my 20s, which now seems like a luxury I didn’t appreciate.无论在人工智能革命中Z世代的命运将如何，我都希望长辈能对他们施以更多的同情而非不屑。至少我在二十多岁时遭遇的拒绝都是当面进行的——这如今看来竟成了我不曾珍惜的奢侈。Jessica Grose是观点文章作者，撰写关于家庭、宗教、教育、文化以及当下生活方式的文章。翻译：杜然点击查看本文英文版。