For some Gen Zers, it’s already time to retire. A new trend known as “micro-retirement” has spread like wildfire on social media. It involves young adults working for a few years, quitting their jobs to pursue life experiences, and then repeating the cycle. While it is tempting to dismiss this trend, micro-retirement’s appeal to Zoomers reveals much about their unique perspective on life.
One popular influencer, Adama Lorna, made the case for micro-retirement in a TikTok video: “Instead of waiting until you’re 60 or 70 to travel the world and indulge in hobbies, you do them while you have your youth, your energy, and health.” As she sees it, micro-retirement is a way for young people to have their cake and eat it too. By “retiring” every few years, they’re able to reap the freedom that comes with retiree life while enjoying their youth.
Lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss coined the term “micro-retirement” in his book titled The 4-Hour Workweek. Although it was written in 2007, it didn’t catch on among Millennials. The fact that Zoomers popularized a term coined while they were learning their ABCs suggests that something about their generational experience primed them for it.
What might that be?
Studies on Gen Z’s work attitudes provide some clues. One finding is that they value work-life balance more than other generations. SurveyMonkey found that 32% of Gen Z employees rank work-life balance as the most important factor of a job, compared to 28% of Millennials and 25% of Generation X.
Some chalk this up to the role COVID-19 played in shaping Gen Z’s outlook. “People didn’t really talk about work life balance,” said Wendy Smith, SurveyMonkey’s senior manager of research science, in an interview. “You had work and then you had your life, and depending on how much you wanted to be successful, you would dedicate all of your hours to your job.”
In other words, coming of age during the era of lockdowns, Zoom classes, and remote work caused the line between work and life to blur. This led many Zoomers to become more conscious of work-life balance than previous generations, who were able to take the division between those two worlds for granted.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Gen Z cares less about work, though. In the same survey, Gen Z respondents were considerably more likely (22%) to rank career growth as important in a job than Millennials (13%) and Gen X (9%).
COVID-19 isn’t the only factor. At the 2024 World Economic Forum, future-of-work expert Ravin Jesuthasan argued that Gen Z’s perspective on work has also been shaped by watching Millennials struggle to find success:
I think they have more of an attitude of work to live as opposed to live to work that many of us grew up with. This is particularly true in the West. They have seen the legacy of all these broken promises. In the old days and in many parts of the West, they would promise you if you worked for 30 years, you have this defined benefit pension, you have retiree medical care, etc. None of that exists today.
And so they’ve seen that get taken away from their parents or grandparents, and now there’s a sense of, ‘I’m only as good as the skills I have. I’m only as good as the value I’m delivering today, and so these are the terms under which I want to work, and you either meet them or not.
Without getting into the specifics of Jesuthasan’s claims, it’s clear that Millennials have had unique challenges of their own. This generation dealt with multiple recessions, a pandemic, and skyrocketing prices for housing, healthcare, and education. Perhaps as a consequence, Millennials are reaching key milestones such as family formation and home ownership considerably later than previous generations.
This isn’t about victimhood, but rather understanding the unique challenges each generation faces. Despite them, Millennials remain in some ways financially better off than previous generations.
Still, it’s understandable why many in Gen Z would look at the Millennial generation’s failure to maintain the pace set by previous generations and conclude that working to live, rather than living to work, is the preferable approach.
Mental health is another factor. In study after study, Gen Z reports worse mental health compared to other generations. According to one study from Verywell Mind, “63% of Gen Z say their mental health in the last month was less than good, compared to 52% of millennials, 49% of Gen X, and 28% of Boomers.” Another from Deloitte found that only 52% of Gen Z respondents rate their mental health as good or very good, compared to 58% of Millennials.
Regardless of why micro-retirement is so appealing to Gen Z, it’s clear that this generation’s quirky work attitudes will have serious consequences for the country.
A ResumeBuilder.com survey of managers and business leaders found that 74% characterized Gen Z as the “most challenging generation” to work with. Roughly 40% who responded this way ascribed that challenge to Gen Z lacking critical skills. The same number of managers also said that Gen Z was “easily distracted.”
As a younger Millennial born on the cusp of Gen Z, I can empathize with their challenges. COVID-19 was horrible for us all, but it was particularly horrible for those whose high school years were warped by the lockdowns. But self-victimization is an easy trap to fall into—and a much harder one to escape from.
Fortunately, empathy and tough love aren’t mutually exclusive. Micro-retirement and its darker cousin, quiet quitting, might appeal to some young people, but these trends are setting up America’s youth, who were in many ways dealt a bad hand, for failure. At bottom, they are just another form of escapism, a way to run from the challenges of the workplace.
Instead, Gen Z should pursue healthy, time-tested remedies for life’s stresses: religion, family, and virtue. Since they’re going to be running the country someday, I certainly hope they do.