Young people do not want to work

“Today's young people are lazy,” they say, "they don't want to work. In interviews to apply for a job, the first thing they ask is how many vacations they are going to have and how short their schedule is going to be". Is it true that they have no stamina, or is it that they are not stupid?

Certainly, there have always been professionals in the field of scrounging, rogues who specialize in living by the tale, and lazy people who prefer soup to bending over backwards; but the truth is that I know many young people whose work capacity is absolutely extraordinary.

The efforts of young people

I am talking about Anita who, every morning, comes early in the morning to clean the elderly, because she works as an auxiliary of the municipal dependency service. It is hard physical work and not always pleasant. Emotionally it is also very complicated, because she has to deal with people to whom she is fond of, but whose situation inevitably involves separations, sometimes very painful. She works shifts from Monday to Sunday, and in the evenings she sometimes goes out well after 10:00 a.m. She uses the days off and the free time during the day to study. She is working towards her nursing degree and is working tirelessly to get it.

I am also talking about Joaquín, who has taken two careers at the same time, obtaining an extraordinary prize in each one of them. Joaquín belongs to a large family and works hard at home. He takes care of the younger siblings when necessary, is in charge of various fixed household chores and is available for whatever comes up. He also has time to give private lessons and thus earn some income to avoid being burdensome at home.

Or I talk to them, for example, about Monica, She is preparing for a competitive examination for which she has practically squandered her social life. It is true that she is very organized and manages to scrape a few hours for her outings (few and short) and her work as a volunteer in a parish where she helps other young people like her. When her friends plan a trip or an impromptu outing, they don't invite her because they already know what her answer will be: «Sorry, I can't».

The crystal generation

Anita, Joaquín and Mónica are not lazy despite belonging to the so-called «crystal generation» (born in the late 1990s or early 2000s). According to this denomination, they should be young people with low frustration tolerance and high emotional sensitivity, i.e., fragile as glass. It is assumed that the overprotection to which they have been subjected since childhood would have rendered them incapable of making an effort or taking orders from a superior other than their mother. However, there they are, tireless, proud of what they do, aware that they have to work hard in this life and hopeful of making their way in the labor market and in adult life.

But none of the three are satisfied with the excuse that effort and self-improvement go a long way; they consider it a phrase from Mr. Wonderful, because they know that nowadays the social pact has been broken. There are few companies in which workers are more than just a number, in which the effort and perseverance of employees is rewarded and their welfare is considered outside working hours.

They have seen their parents being fired after having sacrificed the best years of their lives at the cost of their own physical, mental or family health. They know of cases of people who have gone far, yes, but not for working harder or better, but for being friends or family of... or for having no scruples when it comes to crushing their colleagues.

They have seen how people with very little talent, but with the ability to adapt to the ideological wind of the moment, have found work much more easily than those who profess ideas that go against the current.

They have seen men and women addicted to the work, They are unable to disconnect and build a life beyond their profession. They have seen couples grow old alone in a nursing home because they discarded the idea of having children to give their full potential to a company that today no longer exists.

They have seen working people give up going out for a beer or going on a getaway to pay for the career of a son who now works delivering online sales packages because 100,000 like him have a degree and the market does not have the capacity for so many graduates. And on top of that, they have grown up watching uneducated young people become millionaires doing something as easy as showing their intimacy or recording their witticisms without leaving home.

Work as a gift

That many young people choose, therefore, to work to live rather than live to work corresponds, at this moment in history, to the most elementary logic and perhaps they can help us to put reason in the unreason that we have turned into a labor market that does not put the human being, the family, at the center, but only the economic benefit.

On this feast of St. Joseph the Worker, it is worth reflecting on the matter. If work goes from being a sacred gift to becoming an idol, it soon shows that it has feet of clay and young people, who are not fools and who are discovering how much deception there is in so many promises that we offer them as a society, have realized it. By the way, according to the SM Foundation, In the last five years, the number of young people who declare themselves Catholic has gone from 31 to 45 percent. That said, they are smart, and they have caught us.