The Modern Workplace Is Becoming Human Fracking
People Aren’t Burned Out From Work.
The Modern Workplace Is Fracking the Life Out of Them.
I have heard some version of “kids these days just don’t want to work” for most of my life. As a member of Gen X this was a critique I commonly heard.
Every generation seems convinced the next generation lacks grit, discipline, resilience, or work ethic. The complaints change slightly with the decade, but the underlying message stays remarkably consistent: younger workers are supposedly softer, less loyal, and less willing to sacrifice.
What gets discussed far less often is how dramatically organizations themselves changed during the same period.
Many workplaces quietly became extraction machines.
Staffing was cut to the bone. Loyalty became conditional. The boundary between work and life eroded and was replaced by a 24/7/365 asynchronous demand platform ironically called Slack. Economic insecurity was reframed as flexibility and renamed the gig economy. Employees became permanently reachable while institutional trust steadily eroded. Every year organizations demanded greater efficiency, greater responsiveness, greater emotional labor, and greater adaptability from increasingly depleted human beings.
And I am not only talking about corporate America.
