Why Gen Z's Getting Lazier and Crazier
Tantan Hermansyah
Lecturer of Sociology at UIN Jakarta
Once, there was a time when the workplace was a stable socio-cultural ecosystem, a building with a predictable foundation. For Gen X and early Millennials, the professional world offered a clear roadmap. Specific skills met relevant positions, and the career ladder was built on the accumulation of experience and clear administrative milestones. In that world, the future could be calculated, and rest was a legitimate part of the human rhythm.
Today, that narrative has collapsed. As Gen Z enters the workforce, they aren't stepping into a stable structure; they are falling into a "bubu"—a traditional fish trap designed for easy entry but offering no way out. They haven't found a career; they have found a digital cage.
The phenomenon we are witnessing is not a standard professional dynamic; it is a structured, mass burnout. Gen Z is no longer chasing upskilling to climb a ladder; they are doing it as a survival mechanism just to keep from being ejected from the system. This is the sociological hedonic treadmill in its most brutal form.
They are sprinting at top speed on a stationary belt, breathless and drained, only to remain in the exact same place. In 2026, self-improvement is no longer about actualization or potential; it is an elimination of existential anxiety. To stop learning for a single day is to become obsolete in a world driven by cold, global competition and the unblinking eye of the algorithm.
In his seminal work The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes the modern subject not as a victim of external command, but as a prosumer of their own exploitation. Gen Z has become both the victim and the executioner.
They exploit themselves in the name of productivity and flexibility, feeling a soul-crushing guilt the moment they stop to breathe. This pressure doesn't just come from an authoritarian boss; it is baked into the very structure of the gig economy and precarious contracts. When unemployment can happen at the click of a button without warning, career becomes a synonym for survival mode.
This fear is exacerbated by what Yuval Noah Harari calls the threat of the useless class. Gen Z is not just competing with their peers; they are in a desperate race against Artificial Intelligence—a machine that never sleeps, never burns out, and never asks for a raise. To keep up, humans are being forced to delete rest from their internal dictionaries, transforming themselves into biological robots powered by anxiety.
This is the ultimate anthropological irony: Gen Z is inheriting a world of deconstructed structures—from the climate to the economy—that was built by the generations before them, yet they are the ones tasked with running the marathon on a crumbling track.
We cannot allow an entire generation to drown in this sea of uncertainty. We must reconstruct the very definition of productivity. Institutions must realize that humans are not hardware that can be infinitely upgraded.
We need a right to disconnect as a fundamental labor law, ensuring that mental health is not a luxury but a requirement. If we fail to intervene, we will bequeath a civilization where humans have lost their humanity, forced to function without ever being allowed to be.
Gen Z are the heirs of our future; we cannot let them die of exhaustion inside the "bubu" of a system we created, while companies watch from the sidelines, ready to replace their burnout with a line of code generated by a monthly subscription of the latest Claude model.
This article was published in Kompas on Monday (27/4/2026).