Things aren't great in the workforce if you're a millennial or Gen Z.
Thirty or forty years ago, you could afford to buy a house on a minimum wage, now even an above average wage can leave you just about getting by.
Factors like this lead many younger people to re-evaluate their relationship with work, including how we progress through our working lives from junior to senior roles.
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But first, let's go over the old ways.
You start in an employee role, get promoted up to a junior management job, then make it to the sunlit uplands of middle and then senior management.
The problem is that while that first junior management role means a pay rise, it usually comes with a whole lot more responsibility.
But, you might be thinking, without the junior management role you can never get to the upper roles, with their higher salaries, corner offices, and priority parking spaces for your company car.
And you would be right. One theory from TikToker Kyyah Abdul is that many people see the junior role as an 'internship' for the higher ones.
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You put the hours in, pay your dues, and eventually move up the ladder.
Except now, with people at the top working for longer, there's nowhere to move. So you end up stuck in the junior management role, where many feel the pay doesn't match the extra work.
And so we come to the Millennials and Gen-Zers explaining just why they're happy where they are.
Among them is TikToker @littlemisstrena, who asked the telling question 'why would you want to become a manager?'
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She said: “I absolutely fell for this. This was like two jobs ago and I still believed in like career advancement and, like, wanting to work my way up, so I became a supervisor.”
She went on to explain that becoming a supervisor only meant that she had a 'dollar pay bump', which didn't adequately compensate for the extra work.
Abdul went further, making a chart of a company structure with the work and pay for each level from employee to upper management.
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Using 'dubloons' to illustrate her point, she said: “So you become a manager, and you realize, ‘Hold on, I only get a full doubloon despite doing three times the work I was previously doing as an associate'?"
But whereas before people might be willing to take that for the promise of moving up, now they end up stuck there.
Meanwhile, people working as employees see them stuck there and get the not incorrect impression that there is no point in moving up, and they're better off where they are.
Combined with an increased awareness of work/life balance among a generation of people who have not received the rewards of work they were promised, and it's small wonder.
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