In 2010, not long into my first job on a magazine now in the great magazine graveyard in the sky, a fellow junior and I were appraising the performance of a new intern. Fresh out of university, this person had arrived late and then suggested they conduct the celebrity interview for the next issue. “That’s the thing with these young ones coming through now,” my colleague said with a solemn shake of their head, “they just don’t want to put the graft in.”
Twelve years later and society is in a moment of transformation when it comes to work and our attitudes towards it. The Great Resignation – or at least the Great Thinking About Resignation – is upon us. The Covid pandemic smashed through many of the grand narratives we have passed down for generations about having a job: the need to be present in an office, the idea we are somehow indispensable to the wider machine we are operating in.
